Neil Gaiman Interview, Coraline

MoviesOnline sat down recently with Neil Gaiman to talk about the new movie, Coraline, based on his novel that has sold over one million copies worldwide. Combining the visionary imaginations of two premier fantasists, director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) and author Neil Gaiman (Sandman), Coraline is a wondrous and thrilling, fun and suspenseful adventure that honors and redefines two moviemaking traditions. It is a stop-motion animated feature - and, as the first one to be conceived and photographed in stereoscopic 3-D, unlike anything moviegoers have ever experienced before.

Gaiman is the award-winning, prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics and drama. His acclaimed four-part novel Stardust, which appeared in DC Comics in 1997 with illustrations by Charles Vess, became a movie in 2007 directed by Matthew Vaughn starring Clair Danes. His best selling novel American Gods earned the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SX and Locus Awards, alongside many award nominations, including the World Fantasy Award and Minnesota Book Award and appeared on many best-of-the-year lists. His novels for grown-ups also include Anansi Boys which debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List in September 2005; Interworld, co-authored with Michael Reaves; Odd and the Frost Giants; The Graveyard Book; and Good Omens, co-authored with Terry Pratchett.

In 2002, Gaiman wrote and directed his first film, A Short Film About John Bolton. He wrote the original screenplay for the fantasy adventure Mirrormask, which was made into a feature by and with his frequent collaborator Dave McKean. With Roger Avary, Gaiman wrote the screenplay adaptation for Beowulf, the motion-capture feature directed by Robert Zemeckis and released in 3-D; and is writing the screenplay adaptation of the graphic novel Black Hole. In feature development is an adaptation of the six-part television series Neverwhere, which aired on the BBC in 1996. His novel of the same name, set in the same strange underground world as the program, was issued in 1997.

Gaiman is the creator and writer of the celebrated DC Comics series Sandman, which won nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (including the Eisner for Best Writer four times) and three Harvey Awards. Issue #19 took the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, making it the first comic book ever to be honored with a literary award. Gaiman revisited Sandman by way of the 1999 prose book The Dream Hunters, with art by Yoshitaka Amano. The new work won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Illustrated Work from the Horror Writers Association, and was nominated for a Hugo Award. In 2003, he came out with the first Sandman graphic novel in seven years, Endless Nights, which was published by DC Comics and became the first graphic novel to make The New York Times best-seller lists.

His first book for children, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, illustrated by Dave McKean, came out in May 1997 and was cited by Newsweek as one of the best children's books of the year.

Neil Gaiman is an amazing artist and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about the new animated feature, Coraline:

Q: Can you talk about your collaboration with Henry Selick and why you thought he was the right director for this project?

NEIL GAIMAN: I started writing Coraline in about 1990 and got about 10,000 words into it. It was the thing that I was writing in my own time, and then I moved to America and I ran out of my own time but I still had the first third of a book written. And, I remember somewhere in my first couple of years in the States, Nightmare Before Christmas got released -- 1993 sounds about right – and I went and saw it. And despite the fact that the title was Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, I looked and saw that it was directed by Henry Selick and I thought “This is awesome.”

And, it just sort of stayed there in my head and it wasn’t a big success at the time. It was a film that I was more or less lucky to catch because it wasn’t out for very long. But it did mean that when I heard that James and the Giant Peach was coming out, which would not have been a film I would have gone to see for pleasure, I made sure that I went along and saw it and thought, “Okay, I really do like this Henry Selick. I like his sensibility. I like what’s going on here.” Which meant that when I finally finished Coraline, which I did mostly by the expedient of no longer reading before bed, because the whole idea was, you know, where do you get the time from?

And my time was completely taken so what I did was I put a notebook by my bed and every night instead of reading 10 pages before I went to sleep, I would write 50 words. On a good night, I would write 100 words in longhand. You’re essentially doing a page a week. But, two years later I’d finished the book. I’d managed 20,000 words over that two years. And when it was finished, and it was still in first draft, I sent it to Henry. I gave it to my agent and said, “Please give this to Henry Selick,” and got a call back a week later from Henry saying, ‘I love it. Can we get together when you’re next in L.A.?” And the next time I was in L.A., we did. We got together and we spoke and it became very obvious to me that I really did want this man to do it.

He wrote a first draft which was incredibly faithful to the book and I remember suggesting to him that perhaps he should be a little less faithful to the book because things in the book… Well, for example, in the book you have a little girl who nobody is talking to. Nobody is talking to her, nobody is paying attention to her, everything she says is pretty much ignored. There are no conversations between her and somebody else where they’re actually listening to what she says and replying to that. They can’t even get her name right, which is absolutely fine except that once you get that on screen, she’s not talking, she doesn’t get to talk to anybody, and you’re following her down corridors and stuff. And that was the point where Henry went away for about a year and agonized and then came back with his second script which had Wybie in it and had all of the stuff. Pretty much everything that we wound up with on the screen was from Henry’s second draft script. I remember just saying, “Okay. This is good. This reads just like a movie script. This reads like something cool.”

From that point on, in terms of my collaboration with Henry, there were a few big things. There was the point where the option expired and by that time the book had come out and it had become a best-seller and it was famous and major studios started swimming around it like sharks. I wound up giving Henry I think it was like an 8-month or 9-month free option on the book which is something you don’t do because I had faith in him and I thought he was going to get it together which he did at a time when the Disneys of the world were actually out there.

What else did I do? I got to suggest (Dawn) French and (Jennifer) Saunders. They were my casting. He didn’t know who Dawn was, he only knew Jennifer through Ab Fab, but Dawn had done the English audio book and Dawn is married to Lenny Henry who is one of my best friends. And I went, “Okay. I really want French and Saunders to do this. I want them.”

Q: The Vicar of Dibley has an international audience? [Note: Dawn French created the memorable role of Geraldine Granger in The Vicar of Dibley, one of the U.K.’s most successful television series.]

NEIL GAIMAN: It does, but Henry didn’t know about that. Henry really didn’t know who they were. He had see Ab Fab, but what I loved is, he trusted me enough that when I said, “Henry, you need French and Saunders to do Spink and Forcible,” he just said, “Oh, okay,” and hired them. And then, bless him, for at least one day he thought I was mad because it wasn’t working and it wasn’t until Jennifer and Dawn came to him at the end of a day’s essentially wasted recording that had not worked and it really wasn’t crackling and they said, “Henry, would you mind if we swapped parts?” And he said, “Let’s try it,” and suddenly Dawn who had been Spink became Forcible and vice versa and it just crackled and became lovely and funny.

Q: Can you talk about the genesis of the story and how you came up with the whole idea of Coraline?

NEIL GAIMAN: Sure. It began in about 1989, 1990, somewhere around there. My daughter, Holly, would come home from kindergarten -- she’d be about 4 or 5 years old – and she would climb on my lap because I would be sitting in my office writing and she would dictate stories and they were terrifying. They’d be about little girls coming home and finding out the evil witches were now impersonating their mothers. Normally the girls would then get locked in cellars and they would have to escape and try and find their real mother with the witches coming after them.

Q: Were you worried?

NEIL GAIMAN: No, I thought it was cool. I mean, they were great little stories and I thought, “Okay, cool.” I thought I’ll go and find her some stories like this to read to her and nobody seemed to be writing any. I couldn’t find any so I thought I’ll write her one, I’ll write a story that Holly would like. And that was where it began. That really was the genesis. I sat down and I started writing Coraline which was a name that I think I took from a typo. I’d been writing a letter to a friend called Caroline and I transposed. Larry Niven, the science fiction author, wrote an essay years ago which I’d read in a book on writing science fiction where he said, “Treasure your typos. You may always need to use them. Remember your typos.” And it was one of those places where I went, “Coraline! I like that. It’s got a mirror in it, it reflects Caroline. It’s beautiful.” It’s like it has coral in it, it has beauty in it, it has things beneath the depth, and it’s also a name that people are always going to mishear and if you don’t pay attention, you will turn it into Caroline.

Q: What did you use for inspiration for the story? Did any previous fairytale or writer inspire you?

NEIL GAIMAN: The nearest I had as an inspiration for the story is a now completely forgotten…I say ‘now completely forgotten’ as if she was ever remembered…a lady named Lucy Clifford. And Lucy Clifford was a Victorian writer who wrote the Anyhow stories which are very, very badly written, quite nightmarish, and very, very peculiar stories of which my favorite is called The New Mother and it’s about a mother who lives with her two children in a little cottage and she keeps warning them because they keep misbehaving that, unless they are good, she is going to have to leave and their new mother will come. And one day they go off and they do some naughty stuff and they come home and their mother is packing up and she’s saying, “I’m sorry, children. I have to go now.” And she goes away and she leaves them and they’re just alone in this cottage and then they look out of the window because they can hear something and coming towards them down the path they can see the setting sunlight glittering off the glass eyes of their new mother and they can hear the swish, swish, swish of her wooden tail. And that’s where the story ends. It’s called The New Mother by Lucy Clifford.

Q: Where did the 3-D part come in?

NEIL GAIMAN: The 3-D part came in because Henry had been talking for years to me about ways that he wanted to try and distinguish the other world from the regular world, and I’d been worried at the point where he kept talking initially about CGI. He’d said, “We’ll do half of it stop-motion and half of it CGI.” And I was like, “Oh God, no, don’t do that.” But, all you can do is just sort of keep your fingers crossed. And then Henry and 3-D go back an incredibly long way and Henry and the founder of Real-D go back. You’ll have to ask Henry, but I think he did a rock video in 3-D years and years ago, so he knew about this. And I don’t know at what point Henry decided that actually 3-D was the way to go, but he did brilliant things. He redesigned all of the sets so that, although they look the same, the distances are completely different between the various versions of the sets. The sets in the other world actually have incredible depth. The sets in our world look as if they have depth but are incredibly flat and they have raked floors and angled things so that you get an illusion of depth but it’s still kind of a very flat world. It’s only when you go into that other world that things recede from you and the proscenium arch suddenly opens up. It’s quite brilliant.

Q: Was there anything – a scene or a visual -- in your book that you kind of wished had been in the movie that got left out?

NEIL GAIMAN: What would I have liked? There’s one moment in the book where Coraline talks about bravery and talks about her dad that I would have loved to have made it into the movie, which is basically the point where she’s just talking about how her dad got essentially attacked by bees and saving her, and I would have loved it if that scene had made it in and I completely understand why it didn’t. And I think it may even have been in one of Henry’s original scripts. I liked it there because, for me, it was about how it really sort of gave you a nice solid feeling about how this really is a family, and I loved the fact that Henry’s actually put the family up against a deadline and you can tell the mother’s in pain. Basically, she’s not grumpy at Coraline, she’s just grumpy, they’ve been rear-ended, her neck hurts, they’re up against a deadline, and they’ve moved the house, and she’s just trying to get through the next week and she doesn’t have time for Coraline. It’s not like they’re …. They’re not bad parents.

Q: She buys her the gloves.

NEIL GAIMAN: She does.

Q: May I ask you why you didn’t write it? It just seems that this is yours.

NEIL GAIMAN: I liked not writing my films. I’m currently writing the Anansi Boys script for Warners and the only reason I’m writing it is because somebody did a version of it for the BBC World Service that I hated so much and that left me so angry and irritated that I said, “I’m doing that.” But normally I tend to feel – it’s the same with The Graveyard Book with Neil Jordan – for me, it was much more a matter of going, “Who do I want to do it? Who do I trust?” And also, it’s kind of the feeling that I did it. I made it. People say, “Why don’t you want to direct the Sandman movie?” I go, “Look, I spent 10 years of my life, I wrote 3,000 comics pages of Sandman. I did it. I made it. I don’t want to go and spend X number of years…”

Q: And you trust Henry Selick?

NEIL GAIMAN: Yeah, for me, it’s much more about finding somebody I trust, finding somebody whose work I like and respect, and saying, “Here you go. Go play with it.” I love the fact that right now with Coraline, on the one hand, I have Henry making this glorious stop-motion film. On the other hand, I have Stephin Merritt and David Greenspan making a musical off Broadway, which is going to start in June, which takes Coraline and is in some ways much more faithful to the book and in some ways much less faithful because they’ve got everything in there and it’s exactly the book beat for beat, but the Other Mother is a drag queen. Coraline is played by a large 50-year-old lady and they are casting without regard to race or gender and they’re doing all this wonderfully strange stuff in a story which is exactly per the book beat for beat with songs that are from…

Q: But Coraline is not going to be a child then?

NEIL GAIMAN: She’s going to be a child. She will simply be played by a 50-year-old woman and it’s the kind of thing where I’m going…

Q: Now you’re scaring me.

NEIL GAIMAN: But I love the fact that, you know, for me, part of the joy of having created something is going, “Okay. I created my thing and it’s here and I love it. Okay, go do stuff.” And Henry has taken it and made a film. You know, he’s made something that I think is the best, most ambitious stop-motion film ever made. It’s lovely. It’s not even arguable. It’s the most ambitious. Nobody’s ever made anything on this scale in stop-motion before.

Q: In an age when CGI seems to have taken over the universe completely, what do you like about stop motion?

NEIL GAIMAN: I love the reality. I love the fact that even the best CGI isn’t real and there is a level on which you kind of know it, just the way the eye processes it and the way the mind processes it. What you’re seeing, it’s not real, it’s not there. You couldn’t actually touch it. And the joy for me of Coraline is that you could. You’re watching it and you know these things, they all exist and that, I find…there’s a glory to that. And there’s also a way that it makes things more palatable. Looking at The Nightmare Before Christmas, for example, arms falling off, a character taking out his brain. They’re things which in live action would probably be kind of problematic and in Nightmare are quite glorious.

Q: Do you like Aardman’s work too?

NEIL GAIMAN: I love Aardman’s work. I think the claymation stuff they do is wonderful. Again, I love the feeling of the handmade quality, the fact that everything that is done has been done by somebody and been made and been moved and that everything has been done with love. I felt almost guilty about Coraline until I was out a year ago at Laika and I did a signing and one of the carpenters at the signing said, “Hey dude, I saw the DVD extras you did on Stardust and there’s a scene where you’re walking around the pirate ship and you’re talking about how guilty you feel because you just made up a flying pirate ship and these guy have been building this thing for two months and then it’s going to be destroyed.” And I said, “Yeah, I do, I feel kind of guilty.” He said, “I’m a carpenter. Dude, if it wasn’t for you, we’d be making shelves.” And I was like, “Okay!”

Q: No more guilt?

NEIL GAIMAN: Really, no more guilt! And the fact that the sheer amount of delight that the animators take in their craft – these set builders, the puppet makers – watching these guys put in joints in things so tiny as to be unimaginable.

Q: It’s the bible on the head of a pin syndrome.

NEIL GAIMAN: Yes.

Q: You can’t believe it can even be done.

NEIL GAIMAN: And they do.

Q: Teri Hatcher said she wants the DVD for this film to show all of that because when she visited the set, she was just in heaven. She wants the DVD to show the detail and the craftsmanship and talk to the artisans.

NEIL GAIMAN: I want people to know this was not done by computers. And the trouble is, when it was first announced the film was going to be made, that was at the period when they talked about the possibility of doing the thing with stop-motion and with CGI and that somehow made it into everybody’s press files, so now they’re saying, “So, I understand this is a film made with CGI and…” “No, no, it’s just stop-motion.” “Yeah, but the computers, they do the…” “No, they didn’t.” You know, they used computers to clean up lines and to remove armatures, the same thing they would have hand painted out.

Q: And to guide the camera in on crane shots, right?

NEIL GAIMAN: I don’t know. You’d have to ask Henry about that.

Q: I’m really happy that your cat is not a villain because all the dog movies that have come out lately….

NEIL GAIMAN: Thank you!

Q: …dogs, dogs, dogs are great, cats suck. I don’t feel that way. I was really happy. Do you have a cat at home?

NEIL GAIMAN: I do. I have lots of cats, although the cat in Coraline was wish fulfillment because, in the place that we lived when I started writing it, we weren’t allowed pets. So, I was actually writing the cat in Coraline because I wanted one. These days I have too many cats and too many dogs. Well, a dog, but he’s too many.

Q: Graphic novels and comics have come a long way in the last few years. Do you still find in your experience that some people perceive them as just for kids only?

NEIL GAIMAN: No, not for a long time. It’s so weird. I mean, the world has changed so much in the last decade. I was trying to put this into context for somebody the other day. It was when I won the Newbery Award on Monday and it was one of those interviews.

Q: Congratulations.

NEIL GAIMAN: Thank you very much. I was trying to explain how the world had changed. I was saying it was pretty strange for me winning the Newbery Award because I have spent so much of my creative life happily toiling in the gutter and being very happy in the gutter. And she said, “How do you mean ‘the gutter’?” I said, “Well, let’s put this into context.” The first time I was ever invited to talk at a university, it was 1976 in St. Louis at the university there, and I was invited in, I discovered when I got there, by the Arts Department, and the English Department boycotted it very loudly and very distinctly because I wrote comics and I wrote graphic novels and that was what I was famous for. And the English Department boycotted it and they made a point of forbidding any members of the English faculty to attend the talk or comment on it or whatever. And I thought, you know, that’s kind of what I’m talking about. But that’s also a strange indication for me of how far we’ve come in the last 12 years. We’re now in a world in which, you know, we bring out the absolute Sandman collection and it gets a full-page review in the New York Times Review of Books talking about what Sandman was and stuff. We’re now in a world in which I went out to talk at MIT or get brought into the University of Manchester and was the biggest draw they’ve ever had. It’s weird. It’s as if I got to stay in the gutter and everybody else came to me.

Q: Or people finally wake up to the fact that the medium is not the message, the content is.

NEIL GAIMAN: The content is the message.

Q: The medium is a way to get it there.

NEIL GAIMAN: Exactly. And I think that the joy of comics and graphic novels for me actually is that we are now entering a world in which they’re starting to have good comics for kids again. It was very weird for me especially in the mid-90s where people were saying, “Well, comics are for kids.” There weren’t any. There were no comics for kids, they were all for teenagers and adults and now we’re actually getting stuff for kids again.

Q: Have your daughters seen the movie?

NEIL GAIMAN: They have. They saw it just before Christmas and they loved it which was an enormous relief because if they hadn’t, I would be in terrible, terrible trouble.

Q: Do you think you’ll come out with another Coraline story?

NEIL GAIMAN: Every letter that I get from kids -- and these things come in, in batches – contains either a plea for another Coraline book or, more often, a suggestion for the plot of another Coraline book of which I can tell you that her going to school and the Other Mother now having become her teacher is well and away the one that most kids seem to be voting for. What I tell people is, “Look, I love Coraline. I would not want to write a story that is not as good as that. If ever I get up one day and I go, ‘You know, I have an idea for a story with Coraline’ and it’s even better than Coraline, I will be writing it like a shot. Until that day, there’s only one Coraline.”

Q: Your child fans are really, really possessive about the book versus the movie and one of the girls Teri Hatcher met at one of her screenings was like, “Well! It’s not the book. It’s been changed!”

NEIL GAIMAN: It was really interesting for me. I felt like the Jonas Brothers at this screening the other night because I got beset by 11-year-olds at the end of it. It was all these girls and I’m signing autographs and I said, “What did you think?” “Well, bits have changed,” they said, “but really it was the same story. I liked it.”

Q: Do you see your daughters following in your footsteps?

NEIL GAIMAN: I don’t know. There’s a level on which all of my kids know that it’s… I, of course, not knowing any writers as I was growing up, had thought that being a writer was the coolest, most glamorous, most wonderful thing you could possibly do. My children, having hung around me and watched me walking around the house grumpily asking for tea and then going back to my computer, know that anything is more glamorous than being a writer, so they’ve become computer programmers.

Q: I loved the book and you did a fantastic job with the story. The adaptation was fantastic.

NEIL GAIMAN: Thank you. Tell Henry when he comes in.

“Coraline” opens in theaters on February 6th.