Even before his groundbreaking comics series The Sandman made him a cult superstar, writer Neil Gaiman had made a name in comics, working alongside artist Dave McKean to create books like Violent Cases, Signal To Noise, and Black Orchid. Over the past two decades, Gaiman and McKean have been frequent partners, collaborating on children's books and graphic novels, though Gaiman has also had a lively career on his own, writing books and short stories, directing the aptly named A Short Film About John Bolton, and screenwriting for television (the Neverwhere miniseries) and film (the English adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke and the upcoming Robert Zemeckis film Beowulf).
Gaiman and McKean's latest collaboration, the sumptuous fantasy film Mirrormask (Gaiman scripted, McKean directed) hits theaters on Sept. 30. Simultaneously, Gaiman's latest book, Anansi Boys—a comic novel set in the same world as his award-winning 2000 novel American Gods—is coming to bookstores. Just before embarking on a massive American book tour for Anansi Boys, Gaiman spoke to The A.V. Club about Mirrormask, Sandman, his Death: The High Cost Of Living movie, cynicism, optimism, and being cool enough to impress his own kids.
The A.V. Club: You and Dave McKean have been working together for nearly two decades, but this is the first time you've done a film together. What your collaborative process on Mirrormask like?
NG: Oh, it was horrible. It was absolutely dreadful. It wasn't as much fun as everything else has been, partly because we'd worked together very happily for about 17 years, and suddenly we were actually having to collaborate. Normally, the way we'd worked on most of our things is that I would do the story and then Dave would do the imagery. With Mirrormask, we both came into it with stories—bits and ideas. And when we sat down to plot our movie, we discovered that we had two completely different points of view on absolutely everything, which probably wouldn't have come as a surprise if we hadn't worked together happily for so long. But suddenly we were actually sort of facing each other and discovering we had different points of view on fantasy, and story, and creating movies.
AVC: Was there any particular point of contention?
NG: The main thing is, having been a writer now for 25 years, I don't like outlines. I find them irritating. I like to know enough about my characters and my story to start writing, and then I like to start writing and find out the rest, because that's the bit I enjoy. And Dave, being an artist who writes very occasionally, likes to do outlines. Having every single thing that happens in the movie, scene by scene, absolutely set before a word of script is written—I didn't want to do that. That takes all the fun out of it. You don't surprise yourself. What I like in writing a script are those moments that are as much of a surprise to you as to anyone else. There were arguments about that, there were arguments on the nature of fantasy. Once I started writing, we'd get into a load of arguments, and Dave was in the right, but I still didn't quite get it in terms of... He figured out how he could use his $4 million budget to make a movie, whereas I came from the school from which I have written my Hollywood scripts in the past, which is that realistic stuff is cheap and special-effects-y stuff is expensive.
AVC: And the entire movie is essentially a special effect.
NG: Right. I wanted to do a school scene, and Dave said, "We can't afford it. We'd have to have at least 10 kids, we'd have to have chaperones, a teacher, locations, this, that, and the other, and it will cost." And he'd see my expression and he'd say, "But look, if you wanted the world crumpling up like a piece of paper and turning into a flower, I can do that for nothing." So we had this very, very strange and testy series of days on the thing. And I think a lot of it was just a shock of discovering that this wasn't as easy and pleasant as everything else in our collaboration had ever been.
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