AVC: Did your previous experience in Hollywood, and the fact that Henson Studios approached you rather than Dave about the project, ever unbalance the partnership?
NG: No, not at all. It's really Dave's movie. I felt very happy recently when Time Out described it as "Dave McKean's Mirrormask," "Dave McKean's movie." I always feel very odd when I see it as "Neil Gaiman's Mirrormask" or even "Jim Henson's Mirrormask." This is Dave's movie. Dave came in knowing the movie he wanted to make, and I felt like at the end of the day, really, I was hands, I was dialogue, I wrote some scenes, but Dave knew a lot of the big scenes he wanted to do. The stuff I brought to the table was things like the anti-Helena storyline, and the stuff that sort of complicated things and roughed them up. If you look at the Mirrormask script book, where you can see us writing backward and forward, I think of this very much as Dave's movie. I was just helping.
The place where having experience in Hollywood before was incredibly useful was during the making of the film, where Dave would send me an e-mail or phone me up and say, "They're doing this, that, and the other. How can they do this? This is the worst anyone has ever been treated, ever!" And I'd say, "Oh no, that's actually very nice. No, that's really polite of them, and generous, and they're being sweet. Normally, it's worse."
AVC: When you argued about the nature of fantasy, what was the disagreement over?
NG: Well, I think Dave can only deal with fantasy if it's allegory, or at least simile. I'm perfectly happy with it being as real as anything, so Dave was only comfortable with the story of Mirrormask in a world in which everything is divided really neatly: Okay, you've got a protagonist, and this is the real-life story, and I can tell the fantasy is a metaphor for the struggle through powerlessness and pain of what she's going through on the other side, and so on. Whereas I figure, that stuff always takes care of itself anyway. So I was very happy to go in and make things messier, including things like adding the anti-Helena to the equation.
AVC: Mirrormask has a strong allegorical, psychological element. At the same time, it's full of overwhelming spectacle. Were you concentrating on any particular level of the story?
NG: No. Mostly as a writer, what I was most worried about was having the dialogue be interesting, cheerful, hopefully funny, and getting me from scene to scene. All the other stuff, if you're doing it right, takes care of itself. And of course when you're writing about that, you're not thinking about the visual. In working with Dave, the only rules that've served me well are, I trust him implicitly, and I have no idea what his final product is going to look like. I wrote The Wolves In The Walls and gave it to Dave and got The Wolves In The Walls back. People say, "Is it what you expected it to look like?" and I say "No, of course not, I'm not Dave McKean. He's the only person I know who sees things looking like that." I might have decided to write a scene with a mad old cat-lady in a house filled with feral sphinxes, but until I saw it onscreen in Mirrormask, I had no idea what it was going to look like. I had no idea what it was going to look like back when it was shot, and it was people in a blue-screen world dealing with blue cushions. It's very bizarre. None of us had a sense, I think, except for Dave, of what it was going to be until it was almost done.
AVC: You've said Mirrormask was meant to be a film in the mode of Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, which were theatrical flops but have been perennial hits with home viewers. Would you be content with a movie that only succeeded in that mode?
NG: Given the budget that we had, at the point where we started making it, the only thing we knew was that it was going to be out on DVD. I feel like we're already ahead of the game. We're getting a release in the theatres, and they'll see how it does. Nobody's expecting it to be a summer blockbuster; they wouldn't be releasing it in September if they were. So far, it's sort of been this Little Film That Could. Just getting it to where it is, despite the complete puzzlement over what it is, and what kind of film it is, and the fact that it has no stars, an English cast you've never heard of... I already feel like we've done more than anyone expected us to do. Do I expect it to go out and net hundreds of millions? It's very unlikely for a number of reasons, notably the advertising budget and how many prints are going to be struck. But we weren't setting out to make something that everybody in the world was going to go and see. We set out to make a kids' film—in Terry Gilliam's words, "intelligent enough for kids, but with enough action for adults"—and trying to create something would be odd and cool and take people's minds to other places.
AVC: Your new novel Anansi Boys is going to be out about the same time Mirrormask hits theatres.
NG: It seems to be the number-one rule of my life: Whatever I do, and whatever the time span over which it happens, things always happen at the same time, and it always looks like I did it on purpose. I love the fact that we had one novel and one film both made in completely different time frames, coming out within a week of each other.
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