Round-table interview with
NEIL GAIMAN
at the Jim Henson Company in NYC
September 2005

with
MaryAnn Johanson from flickfilosopher.com
Hal Johnson from Midtown Comics
Valerie Reupert from Jim Hanley’s Universe (writer of article)

This past Monday, I was invited to take part in a roundtable discussion with Neil Gaiman, writer of Sandman, Anansi Boys, and of the new film, Mirrormask. Gaiman, who is very affable but also very elaborate, answered questions from three interviewers (myself included) on a variety of topics from what it was like to make a film, what his next comic project is, and first, his own geekdom.

MARY ANN JOHANSON: Do you consider yourself a geek?

NEIL GAIMAN: Well, no. I have a son who is a geek and I know he's a geek because he is very proud of his geekdom. He wears glasses even though he doesn't have to. He likes the fact that he figures he looks less like a 6'2 blue-eyed kid-who-used-to-play-hockey when he wears glasses. He is a self-proclaimed geek. To me the idea of geekdom came along too late in life. People say, "Were you a geek or a nerd when you were at school?" I said, "Well, neither. I went to school in England. We didn't have those kind of divisions then." I was a faintly booky kind of kid who probably didn't fit in terribly well and was much too likely to miss his train stop because he was reading and be late for school because I went on one stop too long and had to go back. But nobody sort of went "Ah yes, geek! Nerd! Cool kids over here!" because that wasn't how it was. Coming out to America and people going "So were you a geek in school or a nerd?" and you go "Well I don't know. It's suddenly like you're being asked if you're a Democrat or a Republican, and you're going "Well I thought there were lots of other alternatives." and you're coming out here and people say, "Are you an ice cream or a frozen yogurt person?" And you say, "Well I like crème brulee." And they say "No, no, no. That doesn't count!" So do I think of myself as a geek? No, because I never did. Technically in terms of things like I was on CompuServe from 1989, then on GEnie, and then AOL. I started blogging in February 2001. As far as I remember at the time, it was basically me and a handful of dinosaurs blogging. You know, a couple of pteranadons writing about their day. I'm sure I technically qualify. I'm sure I have my geek credentials.

JOHANSON: Well I think it really is a matter of how you feel, whether you self-identify in that culture. Your work certainly is very much a touchstone for a lot of people who identify with geeks today. I think that you came along a little bit too early to be a part of that culture, but your work is part of what made people feel like there was something unifying there.

GAIMAN: I think also that there's something there… Again, it's an English and American thing. Where people would ask why it was that Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and I, coming in from an English/Scottish culture, would do different things and not doing things as they have been done before in comics. I think a lot of that again came from the fact that we loved comics. We thought they were great. Loving comics in England just meant that you were really weird; it didn't mean that you were the comic store guy. Here were these comics coming in from England like disease germs and fighting people who were susceptible. We were those people who were susceptible to that but we also loved theater and books and novels and avant-garde poetry and weird stuff so it didn't seem like something else in the mix in a cultural thing. Suddenly coming out to America and meeting people that were involved in comics I realized they were involved in comics because they had never done or seen anything else and so it never occurred to them to do anything else. In some ways I find it just as bad if not worse as when I started to write. When I started you were getting people who were writing comics who had read nothing but Stan Lee and the people who had copied Stan. Now you're getting people haven't even read Stan and they're copying the guy that I was around with. Go steal from other places! You know, you talk to Alan or Grant or me and I don't think any of us would have been considered geeks. We may have been considered odd, but we were pulp. It was the time pulp was happening. We were bright, weird guys who didn't fit in but were good at telling stories.

HAL JOHNSON: I had always imagined a fan culture analogous to the US's fan culture and Britain’s, at least in the 60's, centered around Michael Moorcock while the fan culture in the US dated back to the 30s or 40s. Are you saying that you lack the epithet of geek in the UK, is it simply the pejorative or was there no surviving fan culture based around things like science-fiction(SF) fanzines?

GAIMAN: Oh, well, all that stuff is in the UK, though I didn't find it myself until I was in my 20s and by that time I was a professional journalist. I was very rapidly assimilated into it but I was never in it as a fan; when I found it I was in it as a professional, which is a slightly different way to encounter it. But again, even SF in the UK is viewed slightly differently. I remember my first world-con in 1987 and seeing all these American SF fans who looked the same. They were chubby gentlemen with beards and glasses and looking as if they had been bought by the dozen. I just remember the weird shock of that because in the UK, SF people found each other the way SF people do, by saying "Hey have you read the new Michael Moorcock? " But there was nothing considered desperately odd or anoraky about it. As far as I think the English are concerned, the ultimate geeks are the trainspotters. People in England put on their anoraks and head out onto deserted railway platforms trying to write down the serial numbers of every train that comes through in order to have a complete collection of every train in England. The English regard them as geeks and nerds and trainspotters, but people who read SF and comics are regarded just people who read SF and comics. It was fairly hip and cool.

JOHNSON: Is the stereotype of British endurance of eccentricity true or does that factor in?

GAIMAN: The English have no trouble with the concept of oddness. I mean Americans don’t have trouble with the concept of oddness, though I have met more odd Americans than I have ever met odd English. The Americans tend to be embarrassed about them in much the same way one would be embarrassed about a mad aunt: You don't talk about her. You know she keeps cakes in the wardrobe, has a room full of cats, and tends to walk around town in the middle of the night wearing absolutely nothing at all. You just don't talk about her. It's embarrassing. Whereas the English don't mind, "Oh that's just dear old Dorothy." There's definitely a different ideal but it just goes down to that strange American sets of ideals about what things are normal. The idea of normality involves having a family that looks like a 1950s sitcom. And then nobody does and everyone's faintly embarrassed in America and how their family is nothing like The Donna Reed Show because they're sure that everyone else's is. That's the kind of thing I was getting at in Anansi Boys. I like writing a book about how everyone's family is embarrassing in different ways.

VALERIE REUPERT: In regards to science fiction fantasy, do you resource any of that material for Mirrormask?

GAIMAN: I don't think it applies at all. I mean, other than Henson has this wonderful Anglo-American tradition. The Muppet Show was made in England because nobody in America got it. They put together a whole presentation and went to all the major networks and people said it was too weird. Lew Grade in England said ok and they made it in England and sold it to America. It was regarded as family entertainment in the broader sense of the word because you'd get parents and kids watching it. I was always surprised that The Muppet Show was ever regarded as children's entertainment when I came over here. You would have all these great guest stars and you would say "Oh great it's Debbie Harry!" or Vincent Price. So I think coming from that tradition they're a lot less scared of odd. Jim Henson himself made fantasy movies in addition to making puppety movies, like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. It was in that tradition that they came to Dave McKean and me. They said "Hey we made these films in the 1980s. They cost $40 million each. We want to make a new one and we have $4 million. If we give you guys the $4 million, will you make us a movie?" and that was the deal. It was more out of the Henson culture—a very Anglo-American culture. The Henson Company in L.A. is one of the few places in L.A. that I can get a decent cup of tea.

JOHANSON: How did you construct Mirrormask by the fact that the main character is and adolescent female and the way she seems to be battling the urge to grow up and the fear of leaving childhood behind?

GAIMAN: I'm a parent of a couple of girls. With boys you never get to that scary crunch point. Boys just sort of get their heads down and amble on. Then they start growing more hair, and then a bit more hair and everything's a bit confusing and then they get a driver's license. With girls, there's a point where they move from girlhood to young womanhood and prior to that they start oscillating where one minute they're 25 and the next minute they're 7 and just want a hug. It seems to me that that was a very interesting place to put a story.

Our only brief from Henson was that they wanted a family movie. Family movie in America tends to be used as a code-phrase meaning content-free. Meaning something safe to put a 4-year-old in front of and leave them for two hours knowing that they will not encounter any ideas along the way. Whereas for I said to Dave [McKean] let's write something that a 7-year-old will get something out of, and that a 15-year-old will get something completely different out of, and a 30-year-old might get something out of, and a 70-year-old might a completely different film out of, but it will work for them. Stories very often revolve around somebody under pressure and in the case of Helena in Mirrormask; it's such a wonderful place to be under pressure. Speaking of the father of a girl who is now 20 and another who is now 11 so I can see her just riding down that slope into it, you get this point at which, as a parent, you can say something that you consider reasonably innocuous like, "Isn't it about time that you began to think about the possibility of considering to tidy your room perhaps one day?" and suddenly this is taken as a declaration of war and doors will be slammed and things have to be stamped around and then the door flies open and somebody says I didn't ask to be born, you know and the door slams and it will go off again. And you say, "Okay, this happens. It's fine." You know that once the hormones and everything dies down you, everything more or less goes back to normal and now you have a young woman on the other side. The problem with Mirrormask was making Helena sympathetic while also making her mother sympathetic. Trying to make it so you go into that movie absolutely rooting for both of them. Not going "Gosh her mom's an annoying, uncaring bitch!" or, "God she's a spoiled whiney kid." because it's not about that. It's about being in that place where she has to make that jump, and right now there's nothing ickier than looking behind you on the bus and seeing a couple kissing, but she's also kind of interested but she doesn't want to be there right now. She's just figuring all that stuff out, and the story of Mirrormask is her way of figuring that out.

JOHNSON: I wanted to ask you about writing the movie. I read another interview that when you worked Endless Nights for Bill Sienkiewicz and what you got back from him in terms of artwork was not at all what you had written and I wanted to know if that was analogous to working on a movie?

GAIMAN: Bill is just Bill. Bill is a force of nature. Working with Bill, I wrote a script as loose as I could possibly make it figuring that whatever I gave Bill he would do something else, and he did something even elser. At that point, as the writer, I took these 20 pages that Bill had given me and reordered them and rewrote them and written the story based on what Bill had given me. With the movie it's very different because you're writing a script and we were writing the script very carefully, Dave McKean and I, because we only had four million dollars and only one person knew how to make a $40 million fantasy movie for only $4 million and it wasn't me. Normally the way I work with Dave McKean, and I've worked with Dave for 20 years now, and the way that we work is very, very simple in that I go off and write something during at which time I have complete control and power and then I give it to dave and he draws it with complete control in power, and I get back something that's wonderful, strange, and cool. With Mirrormask, Dave knew how he could achieve a bunch of cool effects and do it cheaply—and some of those things were obvious and some of them weren't obvious but the only person who knew how it would work was Dave which meant that we were there together coming up with the story and when I was writing he was looking over my shoulder at every step of the way and saying "Nope you can't do that, you can't go there." And in a couple of cases he would do first-drafts of specific scenes where he would hand them over to me and I would rewrite. Most of the stuff isn't obvious. Once you decide that realism is not your object—that you're going to go for something else—for instance the scene where the black birds attack. Dave said to me so long as they are formless and simply black bird shapes, we can do that cheaply the moment we start to try to do the Lord of the Rings solution, you know 100,000 individual birds and having hundreds of animators working on each individual bird on a bunch of computer programs and things like that. That's when it becomes expensive. That's the kind of thing where we could work it out together. Did I expect what I had written to look like the finished film? No. Am I fairly used to after 20 years of working with Dave McKean to giving him things and having them come back and not to be like what I expect? Absolutely. To the point of where now if I gave Dave a script or a story and he gave me back something that was exactly like what I had in my head, I would get really weirded out.

REUPERT: In relation to film versus comics versus novels, do you find one more challenging or inspiring, or do you see them as completely separate entities?

GAIMAN: They all conspire to keep me interested. When I write Anansi Boys, it's me and a notebook and I get to sit there and make it up and nobody says anything at all. And I like that. When you do a movie, suddenly you have actors and you have things moving around and it's 2 years later and it's fun, and it's really cool as well. When you do comics, it's you and an artist and it's a completely different experience. Or if you do an audio play or radio play—that’s completely different. I honestly don't understand why anybody would only ever write novels, or only ever write movies, or only ever write comics any more than most people understand why I would only wear black. I'm absolutely comfortable wearing black jeans and my black t-shirt and a black leather jacket and it means that I don't have to make any decisions when I get up in the morning. Most people seem to like varying things.

I love it, I think it keeps me fresh and keeps me interested. I never get up in the morning thinking "Oh fuck, I've got to write another novel." because if I ever find myself going to that point, I go off and write a movie or I write something different which is just lucky I guess. I'm glad I have that option otherwise it would be like being condemned to watching black and white1960s sitcoms for the rest of your life. You may like them, but you very rapidly start saying, "Well isn't there anything else?" and you start craving the Jerry Springer show.

REUPERT: Speaking of anything else, are there any future projects in line with Henson, Marvel, or your independent works?

GAIMAN: Marvel project number two: We know what it is and we know who is drawing it and I just need the time to start writing it now. I don't think I'm allowed to say it until Joe Quesada says what it is, but it is a Jack Kirby based project. (*NOTE: As announced this week, Gaimain will be tackling Kirby’s ETERNALS) The next book thing after Anansi Boys is writing my next children's book, which is called the Graveyard Book, and I've written about half of the first chapter so far and it's very spooky.

REUPERT: Will this be another Dave McKean illustrated book?

GAIMAN: I don't know, I'll find out when I've finished it who I want to illustrate it. The next film thing is Beowulf, which starts shooting next week with Bob Zemeckis. We've got Angelina Jolie, Crispin Glover, Anthony Hopkins, and Ray Winston. That should be interesting.