Like his frequent collaborator Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean made his name in comics, but has worked in a wide variety of media. Though primarily a visual artist who got his start doing CD covers and commercial work, he's also co-founded his own jazz label (Feral Records), made short films, composed music, and written and illustrated his own massive comics series, Cages. He's also illustrated Gaiman's scripts for the graphic novels Violent Cases, Signal To Noise, Mr. Punch, and Black Orchid, as well as Gaiman's children's books The Wolves In The Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish. Most famously, he created the complicated collage covers for Gaiman's long-running cult series The Sandman.
Fans of those covers will recognize McKean's signature style in his gorgeous feature directorial debut Mirrormask, which arrives in theaters September 30. McKean recently spoke to The A.V. Club about the filmmaking process, his work on Broadway's Lestat and the Harry Potter films, the appeal of comics, and the purpose of fantasy.
The A.V. Club: What was it like translating your art style to film?
Dave McKean: Pretty straightforward, really. I've made a couple of short films, and a couple of music videos, and things like that. I've worked closely with a CG supervisor, and we've done everything just together. And I found it relatively easy to find a sort of 3D moving-picture equivalent to my... My stuff is generally quite collage-y anyway. So it's sort-of suited to gathering raw materials like shooting actors, then making stills or animating characters, then just bringing them all together in a 3D space. That process is very close to my 2D work anyway.
AVC: Did you face a technological learning curve in getting it to film, or did it all just follow naturally from what you learned on your short films?
DM: All the films I've done have been huge learning curves. I've learned so much in the last few years with this new medium and making this film. Certain parts of it, like working with actors for the first time, was a huge learning curve. But actually making pictures to look like my pictures, I've done it for so long, I'm kind of used to it now. So at the beginning of the process, designing and storyboarding everything, I sort of did all that. And then designed the characters, and doing the textures for the characters, and the texture maps to cover all the animated characters and the sets, I did those, because that's where my sort of coloring and textures get imprinted on the film. But then after that, the animators were free to play and add to the sets, experiment with the animation, and push and pull the characters quite a bit. It was very open, very free, and very improvisational. Then right at the end, once we'd worked on everything together, they rendered everything in many, many layers. And then I could bring all of those pieces together. So I got the final word on the coloring and the look, and everything that makes it look like my images.
AVC: Are your short films ever likely to be commercially available?
DM: Yes, we're putting together a company called New Video in New York. We're going to release all of the short films. It's over two and a half hours of shorts and a few music videos, a couple of very short features, commissions for the BBC, things like that. And they're all going to be together on a DVD, probably in the new year sometime.
AVC: What was it like integrating the way that you had learned to work from short films with the Henson Laboratory experience?
DM: It was the best collaboration, really. They were all my little team, which is 15 men and women fresh out of art school. They were all ex-students, and this was their first job. The great thing about that was, they brought all of their art-school enthusiasm and personal ways of doing things that they'd been experimenting with at art school, and that sort of arrogant feeling that they can do anything, which was fantastic. And they had not worked in the industry for a long time, and felt like there was one set way of doing anything—they were still very open. So it was a nice meeting of minds, really, because I did have to convince them of my worldview, my way that I wanted the images to look, and my view of what the film should be. But they were really very open to that. Also, the workflow was very unusual. Usually, you get to do one small job on a film like this. My idea was, I wanted each one of them to do their short film within my whole film. So they would do a whole chunk themselves. They would create the characters and the sets. They would light it, they would map it, and then we'd go through the camera moves together, and they would put it in and render it all the way through. So when it came up on the screen, that was their bit, they did that whole chunk. And that seemed to be great, most of them really responded to that, and it went well.
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