AVC: Apart from the live actors, how much of the film is CGI rather than puppets or other physical models?
DM: There are no puppets and no models. The actors are shot against blue screens, and there are two small sets—Helen's bedroom, and Mrs. Bagwell's bathroom. That's it. Those are the only sets we made, and then everything else is computer-generated.
AVC: What was the most difficult effect for you to achieve?
DM: God, there were many, and in fact, to be honest, some of them... Most of the ideas that we had worked out okay. And some were a bit of a push, but worked. There were a handful of little ones, they were very small throwaway things that tended to get left to the end of the schedule and weren't really allotted a lot of time, and we ended up just dropping them because they proved just too tricky to do. Usually, the most difficult thing to do is photo-real stuff. Something that has to actually look like the real world, because it's just so difficult to do that. We're just so used to looking at the real world, our brains instantly see when something is not quite right. So that stuff was difficult.
AVC: In the kinds of complicated multimedia, multi-layer artwork you normally create, have you ever run up against the limits of technology, or found things you just can't do the way you see them in your mind?
DM: I haven't found that. I think the reason is that I kind of enjoy the limits. If you've got no limits, you can do absolutely anything, it's very difficult, actually. I always enjoyed working with machines like color photocopiers and letter-pressing type settings, things where the limits are very apparent. You push the machine to do something, and it tries to do its best, and it usually has wonderful qualities all of its own. Then you get a sort of dialogue going, and the limitations become qualities. So I've never really found that a problem. PhotoShop is a program I use all the time with my 2D stuff. And that's an extraordinary program—you really can do anything there, and I've never hit my head on the ceiling. The 3D stuff is incredibly complicated, monstrously complicated, but for the things that I want to do, I've found very simple and interesting ways, I hope, of making images without getting tied up too much in the maps and technicalities.
AVC: Did anything in particular surprise you about the process of going from directing short features to directing full-length features?
DM: Nothing was quite how I expected. Working with actors obviously wasn't what I expected, because I didn't know what to expect. I have worked with actors before, but they'd been sort of puppets for me. They'd been masked, and they haven't had lines, and they'd really just done what I asked them to do, then the image is created around them. I've never really had to work with an actor to build a character, so that was fantastic. That was the area of the film that exceeded what I had in my head completely. All of the animation and everything, to be honest, is pretty close to what I had in my mind. But to have actors bring the lines to life... At one point, we had a scene on a rooftop where Stephanie Leonidas, the young girl central to the story, breaks down and bursts into tears. Well, that wasn't actually in the script, but our actress completely burst into tears and was very emotional, and all of that was absolute revelation, really wonderful.
AVC: Speaking of people in masks, that's been a very central theme in your work, and particularly in Mirrormask. What fascinates you about the symbolic value of masks?
DM: I've always used masks. I think it's a lot about the fact that masks often reveal a sort of subconscious element to a character. The mask is carved and given an expression or markings to reveal something, even though it's shielding the face. Even though it's hiding the face, it seems to reveal something underneath. And I always loved that, the root of a lot of African and Japanese masks. But it wasn't until I made a short film that I really understood why I love masks so much. I made a short film called The Week Before, and I had a character in it playing God and a character playing the Devil, and I gave them both very, very simple masks. Just little eyeholes, a line for the mouth, and small line for the nose, no expression at all. And there were no lines, it was all silent cinema with music. And then all of the body language in the characters created expressions, and you could swear that these masks changed expressions. Sometimes they looked angry or confused or upset or a bit tired, and you were absolutely positive that the expressions were changing. And I thought this was absolutely magical. So that's why I've continued looking at masks. I suppose I wanted masks in the film as a bit of a safety blanket, masks were just one element out of hundreds that Neil and I talked about, but slowly they became central.
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