AVC: How has that lack of free time affected your musical career?
DH: Well, I've never had a musical career. [Laughs.] So I think it's been unaffected. I play the accordion. In terms of thinking of it as a musical career, I think it's sort of like calling yourself an astronaut because you have a shiny suit. I ended up playing with The Magnetic Fields because I met Stephin Merritt—well, I pursued him, really—in order to work on a musical together that we're still at work on. And I had just had the idea for the Lemony Snicket books, and he had just had the idea for 69 Love Songs, and we said, "Well, as soon as we just finish these little projects that we've both thought of individually, we'll work on this group thing," and then both of those projects turned out to be much, much bigger than we thought they would. So I ended up playing accordion simply because he was trying to get the album finished, and he knew I played the accordion, and if you play the accordion, you're usually the best accordion player anyone knows. [Laughs.] So then being on the Magnetic Fields album led to a couple of other gigs. But I'm not very good at the accordion. If I played guitar, I wouldn't be on anyone's album. But because I play the accordion and no one else does, I end up doing strange things.
AVC: What about The Edith Head Trio, or your work with The 6ths? You've had your own bands—
DH: The Edith Head Trio, I would say, would be even less of a musical career than playing the accordion, particularly because I played the accordion in The Edith Head Trio. I'm very impressed by your Googling. The Edith Head Trio and another band, Tzamboni, were two bands I was in after college that played at tiny clubs to little acclaim. Our Gypsy tango version of "When Doves Cry" was our biggest hit. [Laughs.] But we were not destined for greatness.
AVC: When you do public readings, you appear as Daniel Handler, and tell the audience that Lemony Snicket met some kind of horrible fate on the way over. Do kids generally seem to get the joke, or do you have to deal with weeping children who've just basically been told, "Oh dear, you just missed Santa Claus, and then he got eaten by a bear"?
DH: For the most part, it seems that children are quite used to adults standing in front of them, calling for attention, and telling them a complete lie. So they usually have figured out what the gig is. The problem is actually more with adults. I was once almost forced off the stage at a large chain bookstore that shall remain nameless, because she introduced me as Lemony Snicket, and I immediately interrupted her and said, "Oh no, Lemony Snicket isn't here," and then she tried to cancel the event right then and there.
AVC: Did she not get it, or did she just not like the approach?
DH: She didn't get it. Upon questioning on another matter, she also was not aware that Canada was a different country from the United States. Whatever that may say about bookstore managers, she was the most trouble I ever had. And then occasionally there are parents who say, "I brought my child so he or she could learn what the career of a writer is like, and you did this long theatrical performance instead, and I'm very disappointed."
AVC: Because... writers never perform at public readings?
DH: I don't know. I can't imagine why you would want to take your child to see what the career of a writer is like, because it mostly consists of sitting in a room typing, or going to the library and looking something up. Those are not exciting things to watch. They might be exciting things to do, but they're not exciting to observe or hear about. I'm always puzzled by that.
AVC: While you don't play Lemony Snicket at those appearances, "Lemony Snicket's literary representative Daniel Handler" also seems like a larger-than-life character. How much of him is you?
DH: Well... I'm really somebody pretending to be somebody pretending to be somebody up on that stage. The more I protest that I'm not Lemony Snicket, and that I'm Daniel Handler instead, the more it becomes clear to the audience that I am in fact Lemony Snicket, that I am in fact standing in front of them. I think there are probably too many layers of interpretation there. Certainly there are too many layers for me to interpret them.
AVC: The idea of people pretending to be people pretending to be people comes up in a way during the DVD commentary track for Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events, where you play Snicket and director Brad Silberling tries to defend himself from your emphatic dismay over the film. What was it like recording that commentary?
DH: We walked into a room, and they showed us the movie, and we spoke into microphones. There was pretty much no prep whatsoever. And the director was immediately game, for which I am grateful, because if he hadn't been, I don't know what would have happened. Most people ask if we were intoxicated at the time, and we were not.
AVC: As far as you know, did he have any idea what he was getting into?
DH: Well, it wasn't the first time we'd met or anything, so I think he was more or less up for it. I'd made pretty clear to the people at Paramount and Dreamworks that, if they wanted Lemony Snicket to comment, he would be completely horrified by the entire film. And as long as they understood that, it was okay. I'm not much of a fan of DVD commentaries myself, so this was my way of getting revenge, in a sense, for all the puffed-up directors and stars who talk endlessly about the self-aggrandizing minutiae of making a movie.
AVC: What were your feelings on the movie?
DH: Well, for a while, it seemed like it was going to be the most exciting motion picture ever made, and then there was a huge changing of the guard in which I was more or less fired as a screenwriter, and the producer quit, and the director was either fired or quit, depending on whom you ask. If you ask him, he says he was fired. So then for a while it looked like it was going to be the worst movie ever made, hopelessly embarrassing, and by the time it was finishing up, I was so grateful that it wasn't the worst movie ever made that I overlooked many things that might have otherwise upset me.
AVC: Could you discuss why you were fired as a writer from the movie?
DH: Well, it was somewhere between fired and quitting. I had written eight drafts of the screenplay when this changing-of-the-guard thing happened, and I said to the new producers, "I don't think I could write any more drafts." I guess I was sort of hoping they would say, "Well that's okay, this last one is perfect." But instead, they said, "It's funny you should say that. We don't think you can write any more drafts either." So they hired this guy, Robert Gordon, and he ended up rewriting so much of the script that it made more sense to me that he be the sole author of it. Again with the theme of naïveté... It was interpreted in various ways I didn't anticipate. But I honestly just meant that it was the work of Robert Gordon, and even though there's all sorts of cloak-and-dagger stories about who gets credit on movies, it just made the most sense to me that the credit should go to the person who wrote it.
AVC: Is it possible that some version of your screenplays might see publication, so your fans can see how you would have done the film?
DH: I guess it's possible. I hadn't thought of it. I find reading screenplays difficult, as they're only a roadmap for what a movie might end up being. I mean, I wrote those screenplays for Barry Sonnenfeld, because he was the person directing the film. The stuff that I wrote shouldn't be looked at as a holy grail for how I thought the film should be, I was adapting it for the purposes of people who were making the movie then, and by the time they weren't making the movie any more, I couldn't imagine starting over and remaking it for someone else. Which I think is why fairly little of my writing ended up in the finished product, because Brad Silberling is an entirely different director from Barry Sonnenfeld... even though they both have the same, somewhat Hollywood-appropriate initials.
AVC: What do you think of the prospects for another movie?
DH: Well, I know they spent a great deal of money making the first movie, and although I don't know a lot about the motion-picture industry, I know that they like to make a profit. So I think they're still making sure that they've made enough of a profit that it would make sense to make a second movie.
AVC: Doesn't the studio need to worry about the actors aging out of the roles and needing to be replaced if a second film happens?
DH: I guess so. I have this fantasy that the second movie would begin with a brief statement by all of the young actors who had played the children in the first movie, explaining how it had ruined their lives, so we would catch up with Emily Browning drinking heavily in the back of a burlesque bar, and maybe Liam Aiken would be living underneath a bridge, and then instead of the twins who played Sunny, we would just try to find the oldest woman in the world, and get an interview with her sitting in a trailer park. I cannot guarantee that if there is a second movie, that it would open that way, but that was my immediate vision to take care of the casting problem.
AVC: Film is sort of a sincere medium, in that it's hard to tell audiences what to think about what they're seeing. It seems like that would make the self-conscious irony in your work difficult to bring across.
DH: Well, I think it's interesting to see what people did with the story. I don't think film is the writer's medium, and so I was interested to see what a director would do with it. I never thought about whether film is inherently more sincere, because certainly I think if Guy Maddin had directed A Series Of Unfortunate Events, there probably could have been more of the stage-y irony that is in the books. But I was just interested to see what people would do with it, and worrying that Brad Silberling wouldn't do what I had in mind.
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