Neil Gaiman, Stardust Interview

UGO: I sometimes shy away from films adapted from books I really love, and I'm glad I was professionally obligated to see Stardust, because it was amazing. Is there any downside for you in seeing your creations onscreen?

NEIL: Yeah, if it's bad, it can be really bad, you know. Over 10 years ago I Neverwhere for the BBC, and it was sort of mucked up by the BBC in every possible way, from costume, to cast, to the way it was shot, to, you know, everything. And that actually wound up producing the novel for me, because I was so irritated with the TV series, it was like, "No! That's not what I meant," and I went off and wrote the novel.

With Stardust, I remember I was holding my breathe, and I didn't know I was holding my breathe until about two weeks before they finished shooting, and Charles Vess and I went over to the set. I'd been there until they started shooting and then I had to go off to Australia and I just wound up with a full calendar and so I missed De Niro, I missed a lot of his stuff, and now I was flying in and they had about half an hour of raw footage for Charles and me to see. I was terrified and I didn't know how terrified I was until I saw it and loved it and breathed out this huge sigh of relief and said, "OK, it's my thing, it's lovely."

It's very, very weird being the author of the book anyway, because, really, what you want for a film is for everyone to see it, you want everyone to love it, you want people to tell their friends, to go back again and come up to you on the street and say, "By the way I saw your film, Stardust, and loved it and it was so moving and Michelle was so scary and De Niro was so funny and, oh my gosh, Charlie Cox, I loved it and I'm going to see it again and buy the DVD - but the book was better." And that's really what you want.

UGO: Now you're going to become a director; you really can't say that.

NEIL: Oh, I can always say that! But you know, books and films are so different. Films occur in real time, they are one experience, they take two hours to happen and they play out and you see things and learn things. With a book, you have this peculiar experience in the back of somebody's head. You know, you've written something, but you only used words and now they are making their own film in their head, and if its good, it's better than anything you could ever make. I love directing stuff and making films, I love that process as a writer and director as well - it's magic - but for me books are kind of perfect because they involve no compromises at all. In Stardust, there really weren't a lot of compromises, but, for example, in a place where, a week before we started shooting, we had to grit our teeth and go, "OK, we got the lion and the unicorn having a battle in here, and Tristan saves the unicorn and that is how the unicorn comes into the plot and it's going to cost us $1.9 million and will last roughly 90 seconds and we don't have that money to spend at that point, what are we going to do?" And suddenly the unicorn wanders into the story.

UGO: In making this transition to the film, have you been able to maintain a degree of control or input, or at what point do you relinquish that and get to see what they do?

NEIL GAIMAN: Unless you're actually both directing and completely funding the film that you're making, you will have to relinquish control. But what I tried to do with Stardust was figure out a way that would allow me to get a film that I was happy with made. Having essentially gone through various incarnations of the Hollywood experience now, I've sort of learned things you don't do. Stardust itself was first bought for the movies by Miramax in about 1998, '99, and went through an unsatisfactory development period, and eventually I got the rights back and just went, "I'm never going to do that again." And so for the following several years, people come to me and said, "We want to do a Stardust film," and it would be directors or it would be beautiful young actresses who viewed it as a starring vehicle for themselves, and I would simply say no, driving my poor agent mad. And I continued to say no until I started talking with Matthew Vaughn about it.

I'd already worked with Matthew on one project in which we reached a point, very briefly, where we had a small impasse where his producers wanted him to do one thing but we'd agreed to another - it was just a handshake deal - and for about a morning he was ready to do what his producers were doing and then filled me in and said, "That's not what we agreed to do, and I'm going to stick with what we agreed to do. I keep my promises." And although I don't think he knew it at that time, that was what got him Stardust, because I thought that's really weird, a Hollywood producing entity who actually keeps his word. A few weeks ago I was asking a screenwriter friend about a producer whom he'd worked with, who got in touch with me about something, and I said, "Is he trustworthy?" And he said, "You're asking me if a producer is trustworthy. Isn't that rather like asking is a lion a vegetarian?"

But in Matthew's case he was completely trustworthy, and that already had me interested. We talked briefly, he and I, with Terry Gilliam about doing Stardust, and Terry had just come off The Brothers Grimm and wasn't going to go back to fairy tales for all the tea in China. And then the next thing I knew, Matthew, completely unplanned, ended up directing Layer Cake and then went off to do X- Men: The Last Stand, and walked off X- Men, went back to England, and I got a phone call from him saying, "I want to do 'Stardust, what do you say? We'll do it together." And I thought about it for all of about 30 seconds and I said yes, OK. I went out and found him a screenwriter [since] I knew I didn't want to write it myself, and also knew I wanted a screenwriter who I could trust to get the material and who would complement Matthew.

Matthew is very upfront about the fact that he is pretty much a sort of boys' director, and what he loves and understands is the action stuff and the bouncing around, and - I think he's better now - but definitely going in on this he was much less comfortable with things like human relationships and love and all that kind of stuff. So I wanted to find somebody who really did have that, and that was Jane . After that, my role mostly consisted of reading drafts and saying, "I wouldn't do that if I were you." At one point in November, two years ago, I flew over when we had a draft that was pretty much a shooting script, and Jane and Matthew and I sat in Matthew's study and Jane and I read the script out loud, trying to do it in a world in which I took males parts and she took female parts. But it didn't always work like that, and that was really educational because at that point there were a lot of places were I said, "You really don't want to do this because..." or, "Have you thought about doing this?" And some of the things I wanted him to change I was wrong about, and there were battles that he won because he was the director - which was absolutely the way it should be; it's his film. But at the end of the day I was incredibly glad with the film that we made. There were things that weren't there because the budget wasn't with us, but pretty much it's the film that we both agreed needed to be made.

I did the audiobook for Stardust a couple years ago, and one of the things I learned doing that, that if you read Stardust out loud it's 10 1/2 hours long, and immediately you get to the point of, "Where can I compress this?" If you made the film, not only would it be 10 1/2 hours long, but the hero wouldn't be born till a half hour in.

UGO: Did you ever think you'd get actors like Robert De Niro or Michelle Pfeiffer as part of the cast, and did you have anybody in mind to play those roles?

NEIL : Was I surprised? Absolutely. I think the last couple years the casting fairy definitely has been with me, both with this and Beowulf, but with Beowulf it even got weirder because I just remember sitting there with Roger Avary and Bob Zemeckis making up our dream cast in March, and then the following November they were all there, and we're going, "This is really, really weird."

But no, with people like Michelle Pfeiffer you don't sit there going, "We will get Michelle Pfeiffer to play the Witch," you sit there going, "We will get someone cool and scary and witchy to play the witch, I wonder who it will be?" And to be honest, I was just as happy with the unknowns; there is some lovely, wonderful casting in there, but you know, Charlie Cox is absolutely unknown, and he's one of my favorite things in there - watching him go from awkward, nerdy boy to confident hero. He does it so well, you almost forget how amazingly nerdy and irritating he is in the beginning. For me, it's all about the performances - I don't sit there going, "Oh my gosh! We got De Niro!"

UGO: What for you is the spirit or the heart of Stardust, and what makes it work for you as a book when you finish it and what makes it work for you now, as a movie?

NEIL: Stardust, for me, is about a boy becoming a man, and it's about that classic fairytale thing of setting out to find something, to prove yourself. But it's also about that life thing - discovering that the thing you set out to find is very often not the thing you thought you were going to find. Going out on an adventure, whether in life or in fiction, changes you, and that for me was always the heart of Stardust when I was writing it. I wanted to write a story about a young man who sets out to find his heart's desire, and it wasn't what he thought it was. And what we've done with the film is compressed the story and squeezed it, we've occasionally done filmic versions of things I'd done in the book, and we changed the ending, which is something I knew we would have to do when I sold it to Miramax back in 1999. I loved, as an author, writing the end of the original novel because it's enormously fun, its filled with lots of people missing each other and things that never hit in the way you expected them to. And its sort of enormous fun for a reader, who is seeing everything from above and knows more about everything that's been happening than the characters do. But I realized even then it could be incredibly frustrating to have that ending happen if you were a viewer of a film, because you'll be sitting there and expect all these characters to meet at the end and then they all miss each other and you go, "WHAT?! What the f- was that about?!"

UGO: When you saw the finished movie, were there any surprises for you?

NEIL: There were, there were lots of surprises. In particular, there were things that I didn't know how well they were going to work, and there were things I had been worried about in reading the script - if not worried, then at least having slight trepidation. The guard on the wall was one of them - I read the script and said, "Hang on, you know, he's this old man and been on the wall, and in the book I have young men from the village working in shifts of two who come in and blah- blah- blah. But [here] we just have this one old guy. How is that going to work, and where does he live, and for God's sake, Matthew, where does he go to the toilet? Let's be real about this - people are going to worry." And then I said, "No, nobody is going to worry, it makes complete filmic sense." And I was nervous about the De Niro stuff, you know - when I read it in the script I went, "You sure?" And I could absolutely see why they'd written that from the point of view of the theme, in terms of being yourself, of not trying to be the person people try to make you. and it's between what you are on the inside and what you seem on the outside. And it was absolutely great except I read it and said, "This could be so bad. This has potential to go awfully, awfully wrong. And then I said, "Alright, no, it's marvelous!" And astonishingly surprised at that.

UGO: What have you learned from this experience that you could apply to your own directing? I know you have several projects in the works.

NEIL: I'm not sure. I think one of them is surrounding yourself by people you trust. Right now we are putting together the Death movie, and it's a very interesting process for me, putting together people whom I've worked with, trust and could rely on. The joy of doing Stardust was, it was a bunch of people doing it who trusted each other.

The deal I did with Matthew is one I would advise any writer not to do: His option on Stardust was free, and I got to the point where he wanted to make it, I said OK, and that was our deal. You don't do that. I would advise anybody not to do that. I am an old hand in this business, and you don't do that. But I did it because I trusted him and it worked, and it proved out, and I did it because of what we went through four years earlier when I was making my John Bolton movie, and I realized this is someone who I could really trust and work with. But you don't do that. You make them give you millions of dollars and stuff. It may not keep them honest, but it means they have money, they risk it, they screw up.

UGO: Giving your acceptance of changes that were made to the film, how would you respond to someone like Alan Moore, who freaked out over changes that were made?

NEIL: Alan was not involved, and to be honest, part of the way I got involved in making Stardust was from watching Alan, who's been one of my closest friends for an embarrassing number of years now, 22, 23 years. But watching Alan with things like The League of Extraordinary Gentleman and From Hell and stuff, it was really a lot like watching someone walk across the minefield ahead of you, because Alan's perspective and philosophy was, "I've made the comic, it's as good as I could have possibly make it, I have no interest in the film, give me a check, good, go make your film and maybe I'll catch it on DVD sometime." That was Alan's philosophy, and what he wound up with were three films he was unhappy with, two he was really, really unhappy with, and then halfway through the third film , he just sort of broke, and gave all the money away and everything away and really didn't want anything to do with anymore and was really upset. And I thought, "Well, I don't want that to happen." I don't want to be in a universe were I say, "OK, go make the film, it has nothing to do with me," and then be miserable about it, because that really didn't work with Alan. And as a result I wound up with getting much, much more involved and that's why I was a producer on this - that's why I worked with Matthew, that's why I found Jane, that's why I wanted a film I could go to and be happy about.

When The League of Extraordinary Gentleman came out, you had a large number of reviewers beginning their reviews by saying, "This is a really bad film based on a really good comic." I do not want a lot of reviews that say, "This is a really bad film based on a really good book." Call me selfish, but I wanted something I could be proud of. I didn't want to get to the point where I do what Alan did, which is walk off in an enormous huff and just go, "I don't want to play anymore."

UGO: What are your thoughts on what has happened over the past 10 to 15 years with graphic novels being adapted to films, and the legitimacy now of graphic novels or comic books as a source of serious literature?

NEIL: I think they have nothing to do with each other. I think you have two things there that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. On the one hand, you have the growing recognition of legitimacy of work done in comic form, which honestly I think has so much to do with what people like Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Art Spiegelman were doing in 1986. I was a journalist back then, and I was trying to get articles published on comics and it was almost impossible. You had a generation of editors who were just trying to quash it, and had no interest. And now you have a generation that was in high school or college then and reading this stuff - Maus and Watchmen and Swamp Thing - and then picked up Sandman, and they are now editing the literary pages of those newspapers, they are now in charge of the magazines. And it hasn't occurred to them that this stuff that they loved and felt at the time, quite rightly, was as good as anything else out there was culturally inferior. I think that's why you can get Watchmen on the "50 greatest novels of the 20th century" list.

I think the flip side of it is the whole thing of comics and graphic novels being used as yogurt-starter for Hollywood films. Which is fine. I don't think it's terribly important one way or the other, and I find it very difficult - and I know this is the wrong place to say this - but I don't feel Hollywood confers any legitimacy on things. I think things get legitimacy by their own merits. There are great films out there based on comics, and what's really odd is [that] lots of people have no idea what's based on comics including Road to Perdition. So I think it's good but fundamentally irrelevant. Hollywood has liked having things as a yogurt-starter - Broadway plays and novels and now comics as well. One day it will be cereal boxes.

UGO: Fermata - are you still working on it and is it possible to make it palatable for mainstream audiences?

NEIL: I don't know, I think the script that I did for Bob Zemeckis in that case was palatable, concerns mostly of the film made recently in the UK that used a lot of the technique we were going to use and things we were going to use about stopping time and undressing women and things, and we are now waiting to see what will happen with that film, but I don't know, it was a real interesting challenge and what I tried to do when I wrote the script for Bob, was instead of writing a script about somebody who cannot connect with women in real time and is undressing them and masturbating on them and is stopping time and realizing it and observing it so it was more like Annie Hall with time stopping, but I don't know if Bob will do it or not, its up to him,its his film and I wrote the script for him and is undressing them

UGO: Why the mythic?

NEIL: I don't know why. I love the mythic, mythic has always been, if not my bread and butter, at least my cup of English breakfast tea. I was kind of the small boy who, when he got his hands on the Tales of the Norsemen aged about seven, just read it until the pages fell apart. And then spent my pocket money on Tales of Ancient Egypt and brought it home and then puzzled for ages, because it was by Roger Lancelyn Green and I couldn't figure out if I put it under the "L" or "G" in my bookcase - which tells you so much more than you need to know about me at age seven.