TALKING TO NEIL GAIMAN ABOUT FRAGILE THINGS AND EVERYTHING ELSE

[MattBrady]

by Daniel Robert Epstein

The publicist at HarperCollins originally told me that I had an hour to interview Neil Gaiman in person and I told him that I probably wouldn’t need more than a half hour. But after 20 minutes I realized that people wait for long periods of time to get a chance to see Gaiman speak so I ended up using the entire time we had. Gaiman and I, of course, first discussed his new short story collection Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, which collects many of the short pieces that Gaiman had written since his last collection, Smoke and Mirrors, which was published in 1998. Gaiman and I also spoke of his directorial debut, A Short Film about John Bolton, Dave McKean’s upcoming film adaptation of Signal to Noise, what he would have done to MirrorMask had he the chance, an update on the Miracleman situation and much more. Also, I discovered that the word mensch sounds fantastic in British accent.

Newsarama: How did Fragile Things come together?

Neil Gaiman:: Well it came about because Smoke and Mirrors is now in its 17th printing in trade paperback alone and it went through several hardback printings and is now available in mass market paperback. That is very nice because we live in a world in which, very famously, short story collections don’t sell. Smoke and Mirrors has now sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I was in no real hurry to do another but every year I would write a few short pieces.

NRAMA: Since a number of these stories were printed in anthology magazines there’s a good chance a lot of your fans have not read a lot of these.

NG: The odds are that even if you’ve read four or five there are still 26 or 27 you haven’t read. We’ve gone and assembled them from all over. We’ve got one Hugo award winning story in there and four or five Locus award winning stories and maybe a couple of others.

NRAMA: So people get you to do these stories and then they are published and at some point someone says, “Let’s just put them all together in a book.”

NG: Exactly.

NRAMA: Is that how Smoke and Mirrors went?

NG: With Smoke and Mirrors, I had signed a three book deal. HarperCollins, actually Avon Books as it was back then, grudgingly agreed to take two books and a short story collection. It was done in that kind of indulgent way. I remember when it came out in 1998; I’m going “So am I going to do a book tour for it?” They’re going “No.” “Are we doing a big advertising thing and promotions for this?” They’re like, “No. Don’t even go there.” Now enough time had passed and I had written enough stuff for a new collection. We put Fragile Things together and then I heard that they were doing a first printing of a 150,000 copies, which is probably about a 150 times what a normal print run would be for a book of short stories.

NRAMA: I love the cover to the book.

NG: Yes I’m very happy about it. It’s an amazing cover.

NRAMA: One of the things I like about it is that once you pull off the dust jacket there’s not a lot on the cover itself so the dust jacket is necessary.

NG: I like that. That was sort of a secret plan because we could have gone in there and just put the type on the cover again. But I think what is there is beautiful and I also liked the fact that in there we’ve got our snowflakes and eggs and butterflies and amidst the pretty stuff we actually have a little anatomically correct diagram of a heart.

NRAMA: Do you feel like at this point your book publisher really understands how many people show up at your book signings?

NG: They get that stuff. They love it and they’re baffled and delighted by it. What tends to happen is that every time out we have to train new people and I wind up coming across as this mad Prima Donna for a few weeks. We get a new bunch of people in who haven’t dealt with me before. They just assume that everything will work like it does with a normal author, which is absolutely fine. But I remember losing my rag with somebody over Anansi Boys. She wanted to start the tour on the West Coast and move east and I said, “Let’s start the tour in New York because the time difference won’t be as punishing.” In addition to the fact that I’m signing until midnight every night so I don’t get back to the hotel until 2 am and then you get up at seven and if we move west to east we will lose an hour every couple of days which really hurts.

She said, “Well, I don’t believe in beginning tours in New York.” I said, “Why not?” She said, “Well nobody ever shows up in New York. New York is a blasé. If you set up a New York signing you’ll get ten people there.” “Alright, well where will the 700 people who turned up at every signing I’ve done in New York for the last five years be? Where would they have gone? Why would they not show up?” You could see her thinking, “This man is exaggerating. He is just using big numbers. He is trying to indicate that, 80 or 90 people will show up because authors exaggerate.” At that point I’m saying, “Look, go and talk to Barnes & Noble and have them tell you how many people they had to send away at the last signing because they wouldn’t stay open past ten o’clock at night.” Then six months later I did the signing in New York and 700 people show. Then at the end the lady sidled over and said, “Look, I really am sorry.” It’s really weird thing of having to just sort of brief up new people so they believe it.

NRAMA: Is doing a short prose story much different than writing a single comic?

NG: No it’s not. It’s the same. To be honest it tends to serve exactly the same function in my life that doing the short stories in Sandman was. Essentially the giant 75 issue block of Sandman broke down into novels and short stories. What tended to happen was the short stories were a reaction against writing the novels. I’d do The Doll’s House and then it would be really nice to do the short stories of Dream Country. Then after four or five of those I’d be going, “I really like not having to make up a whole bunch of new characters and an entire world for a 24 page story. Let’s go back and do another novel” where, at the end of three issues in, I’ve got the same people. I’ve got the same world I’ve been dealing with. Then I’d do that for eight issues or nine issues and then I’d be really exhausted and I’d think, “What would be really fun is just doing something that I can do and it’ll be over. Just 24 pages and it’ll be done and that tends to be exactly the same reaction that I have with novels and with books.

2002 was probably the most prolific I’ve ever been with short stories. I finished American Gods in the beginning of 2001. The rest of 2001 was mostly spent signing and getting my journal going. But I wrote four major short stories in 2002, which between them managed to net three Locus Awards and a Hugo. Another weird thing about short stories, is that until you collect them they don’t feel solid.

NRAMA: Were any of the stories meant to be comics and then it just didn’t work out?

NG: The one that they wanted to be a comic was The Matrix story. They came to me and asked me to write a Matrix comic to be online before the movie came out. I said, “Can I do a short story?” I just didn’t feel like doing a comic at that point and they said sure. Also there is this one that I wrote as a comic originally, a short story called “Feeders and Eaters,” which I did first as a comic in Revolver magazine with Mark Buckingham. I wasn’t satisfied with “Feeders and Eaters” as a comic. I’d always thought it was good but that it never quite worked and overhauled it in prose. There was another story called “The Court” that I did as a comic in an anthology called It's Dark In London edited by Oscar Zarate and drawn by Warren Pleece. I expanded it into the short story “Keepsakes and Treasures” in there. So there are a couple of things that began life in comics but they wound up in prose mostly because I wasn’t quite satisfied with how they worked out in comics.

NRAMA: Was the problem with the art?

NG: No, in each case it was that they both needed more room than we had. “Feeders and Eaters” was an eight page story for Revolver and “The Court” was an eight page story for a black and white anthology. It sits there in the back of your head going, “I should have done that better.” It wasn’t quite the thing that I had in my head. If I’d been satisfied with them I would have left them there.

NRAMA: Well a lot of writers say that if they start doing that with their work, going back and saying, “That wasn’t too bad, I’ll write it in another medium.” That’s all they would end up doing.

NG: Oh God I’d go mad if I did that. But there’s definitely a tendency to play with stuff if you don’t feel you’ve quite got it right in a medium. Dave McKean was never satisfied with Signal to Noise and currently he wants to make a movie of it. He’s been working on it for about a year. He’s written a script that he’s shown me and he has my blessings. He had to write a new script and get that together and talk to actors. Now he’s getting the money together and I think he has plans. If it was me that wasn’t happy with Signal to Noise then it would probably be me saying “Can I make it into a movie?” But I’m happy with it, I think it’s good, it is what it is, it’s what it set out to be and I like that.

NRAMA: Are you involved with the Signal to Noise film very much, then?

NG: I’m leaving that all with Dave. I’ve read his script and had very few notes and gave them to him and he accepted them with goodwill. I’m helping him put together the financing for it.

NRAMA: So will you be credited with producer?

NG: I don’t know.

NRAMA: What will Signal to Noise look like?

NG: It will look like Dave McKean. I had no idea what MirrorMask would look like until it was done. I went, “You know if I had known it was going to look like this when I was arranging it I don’t know that I would have written it like that.”

For the Stardust movie, I’ve been working as a producer. I’ve actually been to the set and I felt like I’ve been earning my dollar as a producer. When I was in London for the Fragile Things launch a couple of days ago I got to spend two hours one afternoon watching a couple of scenes and giving my input to the director and the editor and looking at all of the posters from Paramount so far and saying “They’re all horrible.” Actually, all but one looked horrible.

NRAMA: Were you happy with MirrorMask?

NG: You’re never completely happy. What I was always pleased about with MirrorMask was that we were given a very specific brief. That was The Jim Henson Company saying, “We have four million dollars. Can you guys make a fantasy movie for four million dollars like Labyrinth? Even though Labyrinth cost $40 million in 1986.” Everything in MirrorMask exists because that was the brief. Can you make a fantasy movie for an amount of money that doesn’t cater a fantasy movie? Watching Stardust being made and knowing how much is being spent is much different. MirrorMask was made with money that wouldn’t have taken you four minutes into the Robert Zemeckis Beowulf movie.

The only person who knew how he could make MirrorMask on that budget was Dave. He had his story and he got me to help him write a script. I would write things and he would say “No, you can’t do that. It won’t work for budget.” Whether it was just physically having characters who would be CGI or whether I wanted to do a scene in her school. Dave would say we couldn’t afford it because we’d need a room, we’d need a location, we’d need seven kids, we’d need an on-set tutor for seven kids. That is what you need if you’re going to have kids in a film. But Dave would say that with the CG we could crumple up the world like a piece of paper and reform it into a flower for practically nothing but we can’t have seven kids in the film.

NRAMA: Even people that I’ve met that are big fans of yours and Dave’s said that the middle of MirrorMask is very slow. Was that something that you guys knew would happen?

NG: To be honest most of what’s wrong with MirrorMask is a function of the fact that once we saw the first cut there was no money to do anything else. Normally what you do is a first cut and then you look at it and you go “Well that looks kind of slow and the ending needs to be longer and bigger.” You work out all that stuff and you do a few re-shoots. But we started with a two and a half million pound budget, which due to the collapse of the dollar had just become a two million pound budget. So by the time everything was computer generated and we could actually see it all put together, that was it. The money was now gone, four million dollars had now been used. If somebody had given Dave another 200,000 pounds, I think he would have reshaped it and repaced a lot of stuff. There was a lot of stuff that I would have done to it. I would have liked the ending to be a bit longer and make more sense. There were scenes and things that really didn’t work in the ending.

NRAMA: The ending just popped up.

NG: Yes and that’s the kind of thing that you discover when you put a film together. You go into the editing process and say “It looked good in the script but now it doesn’t really work so we fix it.”

Now compare that to the process of making Beowulf which cost $100 million. We wrote the script, it was all acted out by performers like Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins. They’ve now spent a year taking that and inputting it and constructing it and editing it and now in a month and a year after they started shooting it Roger Avary and I will go out to the offices of Beowulf near Santa Barbara. We will have a screening of the whole thing sitting there taking notes. It will probably be a screening of everything that exists and we’re going to be going “He needs a new line here and we are missing a scene here. We need to go and get that stuff. Let’s fix the pacing. Then when we’ve done that the actors will come in and do the additional recordings and then we will be into the computer generation of the film. When you have that much money that’s how you do it. When Beowulf comes out nobody’s going to be grumbling about pace. But you actually do need to be able to afford to do that.

NRAMA: Have you seen anything from Beowulf?

NG: Yes. I’ve seen live action stuff. The original recording, I’ve also seen the next stage along, which is the stage that they cut it to and move the camera. It is a lot like watching Shakespeare done by Sony Playstation characters. Onscreen it looks like a high quality videogame with characters knocking around with the body movements and voice of Anthony Hopkins.

NRAMA: Do you and Roger work separately when you wrote the screenplays for Beowulf and Black Hole [adapted from Charles Burns’ book]?

NG: No, actually we tend to go off somewhere so we can argue. Also Roger has this thing about having to write while dressed in pirate costumes and it’s really amusing. Everybody should go out with Roger. The last time we got together I let him drive my hired car once just to move it. He had to move it around the restaurant that we were eating in maybe a hundred yards away. He comes back 20 minutes later covered in sweat having eluded the police on a very short high speed chase. He had made an illegal turn out of the lot and they came after him. Only Roger could have adventures like that.

NRAMA: Oh my God. Was this in LA?

NG: No, they would have caught him there. This was in a little town in Florida where we were hiding to write.

NRAMA: [laughs] I know you maybe had been being a little facetious about the arguing aspect but when you guys do argue when you are writing, what is it over?

NG: Actually we don’t argue very much. We had good arguments writing Beowulf because at that point he was director and co-writer and I was writer. So I sort of had more power as a writer but every now and then when we’d get in a big disagreement he could say, “Well I won’t shoot it that way!” But on Black Hole because neither us planned to direct it, it was very easy to say “Well I don’t remember any arguments.” For one scene I said to him, “I think that this is a bit too problematic and it will never make it in” was for a scene of a young man masturbating in some bushes. But Roger said, “Oh but it’s a Roger Avary scene,”

NRAMA: If it was a real Roger Avary scene, it would have to be a gay sex scene.

NG: This one was a young man masturbating in the bushes while watching a young lady and I said, “We do lose sympathy for the character at that point.” We left it in the draft that went to the producers but it vanished a week later as a result of a begging request and Roger said, “Ok.” So it never got to the point of a real argument but it was just me saying, “You do realize that that scene will never make it to the official first draft.”

NRAMA: Had you read Black Hole over the years?

NG: Yeah I had. What’s weird about that Black Hole is that if you’re reading it once a year or once every 18 months, you have almost forgotten the plot with every issue.

NRAMA: Yeah, I decided to just wait until he finished it.

NG: I’d read it and love it, but in all honesty I couldn’t remember from one year to the other whether these were the same kids who’d got the disease in the previous segment or whether it was starting with a new bunch each time. So it wasn’t until it was all finished and I read the whole thing that I went, “Oh.”

NRAMA: So someone commissioned you to write the screenplay?

NG: Yeah, it was actually Paramount that came to us. They loved the Beowulf script. It was a new regime at Paramount and the first thing they were handed was the script for Beowulf. You could see them all sort of going, “Oh my God I had to study that at school. That’s so horrible. Oh God this is going to be a killer weekend.” Then they all went away and then they came back going, “It’s great, it’s really cool and it’s sort of like that thing we had to study.” So I think that was what they wanted with Black Hole.

NRAMA: Did you have to cut out a lot of characters for the Black Hole script?

NG: No I didn’t cut out any characters. One of the things that makes Black Hole work so beautifully is that the chapters are not in chronological order. So you have to assemble it in your head. In the current draft of the script it is not entirely in chronological order. We could actually build it in ways that are not the same as the way that Charles did it in the comic because that was a ten part comic and this is a two hour movie. But we did wind up building some things and you see different events. I guess it’s probably closer to something like Pulp Fiction, which is nice, because Roger Avary is one of the two human beings in the world who you can invoke Pulp Fiction with and not have people laugh at you.

NRAMA: Touching on some other things, can you explain this website www.wheresneil.com ?

NG: As I understand it there are 2500 squares on there. If you click around a maximum of 2499 times at some point one of those squares has me on it. If you click on that it opens up a thing where you can submit something for a prize and get something free connected with Fragile Things. But you don’t have to just do that, because the idea is when it opens there are 2500 empty squares and any square that’s empty you can claim as your square and you can put a little piece of writing up.

NRAMA: They’re probably all gone now.

NG: No, there are definitely a thousand or so squares still vacant. I think it’s fun but the next time we do it you should be able to upload a photograph rather than just put a little piece of writing in. But it seems really good.

NRAMA: Where have they been shooting Stardust?

NG: They shot it mostly on Pinewood Studios and there was some location stuff in Scotland and Iceland. They originally planned to shoot all the location stuff in Iceland but they discovered you can’t have horses in Iceland. They have these native ponies that the Vikings brought in a thousand years ago and they are very worried that even one horse coming in with some sort of disease could influence the ponies.

NRAMA: Have you been to Iceland?

NG: Yeah. I’ve been there twice.

NRAMA: It must be beautiful.

NG: It is very beautiful and very odd. Reykjavik smells faintly like either hell or sort of this weird sulfury sort of eggy fart kind of smell. That is because the whole place is volcanic.

NRAMA: How was visiting the set of Stardust in Pinewood?

NG: Amazing. I went just before it started shooting so I actually got to walk around on the pirate ship that they built. Said pirate ship cost about as much to build as MirrorMask all together. The saddest thing about it was they didn’t build it to be disassembled. They just built it so that it gets eaten up and popped in a skiff. Then I got in at the end to see some stuff in the witches’ lair which is this enormous set.

NRAMA: Do the sets look like Charles Vess’ work?

NG: Some of it looks like Charles’s work. When we went up to the art department, they were all sort of very scared to meet Charlie and we saw all these books on castles and cottages that they’d used for reference. One of the books they used was Stardust. But they used Charlie’s designs where they liked Charlie’s designs and often they’d go off in their own direction. The seven Lords of Stormhold in Charlie’s designs look sort of medievally clothed. For the movie, they pushed them more toward the 17th century and then they embroidered each with a number. When you look closely you see that the pattern on them is a number. I think the one Charlie thought was the most Charlie-ish was the set of the inn that the witch magically creates in the mountains to lure and trap everybody.

NRAMA: I interviewed Michael Avon Oeming a few years ago and he said there are a couple levels of selling comic books for movies. He said there are deals for more money with less involvement by the creator and there is one with less money and more involvement by the creator. I’m sure it must be different for you since you are a best selling author though.

NG: The deal with Stardust was a no money down option which I never do and you’re not meant to do either but I did it with Matthew [Vaughn] because I like Matthew. I trusted him and he was my producer on the Bolton film and he’s a mensch. There are people out there in Hollywood who I would pin down by contracts and enormous sums of money before I did anything because it is not in their natures to be trustworthy. You deal with them very differently but you also deal with different projects and different directors differently. With Beowulf the only people who had any input into the script were me, Roger and Robert Zemeckis sitting at a big table in these empty offices. We both wound up hanging around eating craft services and in my case meeting Crispin Glover and Angelina Jolie and in Roger’s case meeting Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich but really we wouldn’t have been necessary on set. It wasn’t that we weren’t welcome. It was very nice to have us there and we felt like VIPs hanging around.

Coraline though, is very much Henry Selick’s project. He wrote a script for it, he’s doing it stop motion. I could go out to Portland and I’m sure I’d be very welcome on set but by the time I get out there the maquettes will be moving just a few frames. But I hear good things. I got a postcard the other day from Dawn French saying that she and Jennifer Saunders went out and recorded their parts for Coraline and it was really fun. Occasionally I get sort of early versions of They Might Be Giants songs, which they’re writing for the movie and I stick them on my iPod. But there really is no involvement beyond that. I look forward to seeing it and I hope it doesn’t suck. I don’t think it will, it’s Henry and it’s stop motion.

NRAMA: I really enjoyed A Short Film About John Bolton.

NG: Oh thank you.

NRAMA: A lot of people just do short films so they can see if they can really do it.

NG: And see if they like it.

NRAMA: Did you like the process?

NG: I loved the process much more than I thought I would. I really didn’t know if making a film was something I’d be good at like writing a novel or if it would be something I’d be crap at like putting up shelves. But I found it to be very easy and a lot of fun. I guess the nice thing about working in comics for years is you get very used to collaborating. What you try and do is you find the best person to do the job and then you let them get on with it.

NRAMA: I didn’t know what John Bolton looked like before I saw this film. So for me it could have been him.

NG: The real John Bolton is in the film. There is a man talking very approvingly of the pictures in the middle of the art gallery and that’s John Bolton.

NRAMA: What made you pick John as the subject?

NG: We’ve been friends forever. I adore John. He has enough of a sense of humor to allow me to do that. Every drawing you saw there was actually a John Bolton painting blown up. The film began as an afterword to a book of John Bolton assorted paintings. I took a dash of that and a dash of Pickman's Model by [HP] Lovecraft and swirled it all together and made the film. I loved the idea of using mockumentary to play with the idea of horror. It seemed like something that hadn’t really ever been done. Though once I had the idea and was planning on doing it, Blair Witch came out but that was going off with a very different kind of mockumentary. I wanted to do something which at the time puzzled people. These days with things like The Office, I think it’s a lot less that way. I can’t imagine I would ever do another mockumentary again because now they’re everywhere.

NRAMA: Will Death be the first feature you direct?

NG: I really want to direct it because I don’t want somebody else directing it. Honestly, there are two reasons to direct something. One is because you have a burning desire to do something and to do it right and another because you have a burning desire to be a director and you are. I’m not a director, I’m not. I’m a storyteller but I am a storyteller who, even with Stardust, which I love, you sit there and you watch it and you go, “I wouldn’t have done that like that.” Somebody can turn around to you and say, “How can you permit them to do this like that?” I was like, “Well, I wasn’t directing it.” Unless you’re there calling every moment of course things are not going to be exactly how you would want it. There are bits of the script that wouldn’t have been the way that I would have written them but I didn’t write the script. Jane [Goldman] and Matthew [Vaughn] did and they did a terrific job.

NRAMA: Will your movie version of Death still have the Death Takes a Holiday type structure?

NG: Yeah. It has the same plot as the first miniseries with stuff added to it because if you film it as written it would probably be a 38 minute movie.

NRAMA: Could you combine it with the second Death miniseries?

NG: No because the second story has a different plot. What I’ve done in the script is just expand it and get some of the stuff leading up to that day for various characters and get to know everyone a bit better and then more stuff happens.

NRAMA: Do you have a time frame that you would want to start it by?

NG: Well we started it for Warner Movies. By the time I handed in the script they said “We love this, it’s great, it’s brilliant but it seems to be a $15 million movie and we don’t make them.” We were like, “Well what do we do now?” They said, “Well maybe there’s a branch of Warners that does that.” So then we showed it to New Line, they said, “We like it.” We spent about a year and a half with them negotiating their contract with Warners and DC and then they looked at the script and said, “We think this is a $30 million movie, can you make it cheaper?” We started working on getting the price down. There was a regime change or something and it was decided that it no longer fitted into the New Line shape so right now we are talking to other branches of the Warner Bros. empire.

NRAMA: There’s Warner Independent.

NG: Yes. There’s now Warner Independent, which didn’t use to exist. There’s Picturehouse. I’m working with Guillermo Del Toro, who is our executive producer, just trying to find the best home for it. I’d like to make it before I’m dead. Because honestly doing it afterwards would be...

NRAMA: Tough.

NG: It would be tough, honestly, really.

NRAMA: Ironic, though.

NG: Yeah but tough on the actors. When I’d put my hands on their shoulders they’d have nervous breakdowns.

NRAMA: Last time I talked to Todd McFarlane about Miracleman he told me a bunch of things which you wrote up in your journal and commented upon their…truthfulness.

NG: Todd says stuff in interviews that he thinks they want to hear.

NRAMA: What’s the latest?

NG: The latest on Miracleman is that I have no idea. It’s all incredibly confusing. I won the court case against him, got a huge judgment and so on and so forth and then the Tony Twist case came along and now Todd McFarlane Productions has been operating out of bankruptcy for a couple of years. That means I’m Todd’s second largest creditor after Tony Twist. I never had any interest in being Todd’s main creditor. We’re not completely sure whether or not Todd has a share of Miracleman, nobody’s quite sure. Meanwhile there are more people turning up. I just got a letter from somebody claiming that they own the original Marvelman character on which Miracleman was based and all sorts of weird stuff which seems very odd.

NRAMA: I just want to read the books.

NG: I know. We’ve got at least one of the original artists saying he doesn’t want his work reprinted unless he does. The one part of the whole Miracleman mess that I know that I control is Miracleman: The Golden Age and a bit of the Silver Age. Probably that will be the first book to come back into print because we can. It will be nice if people didn’t have to read this stuff either by paying $500 on eBay or by downloading scans and feeling guilty.

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders is a 400 page hardcover priced at $26.95
http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/books/fragilethings

[nietoperz]

I really can't wait to get my hands on this book. Gaiman is one of my heroes, he truly is: not just a favourite writer but someone I would really love to sit and have a conversation with one day.

[render man]

Great interview! I didnt know there were so many Gaiman movie's in the works. I'm really hyped for that Death movie if its ever made. And Stardust I can't wait to see.
And yeah Mirrormask was way too boring, such a letdown considering those involved.

[McAlice]

Loved it, Gaiman is a very intelligent guy, but then he is English

[jrio]

There's no such thing as a British accent, you mean English.

And there are plenty of thickos living here, they're not hard to find.

[Rich L]

Originally Posted by McAlice

Loved it, Gaiman is a very intelligent guy, but then he is English

Yes, we do have that effect on people. It's the accent. Everything sounds smart in an English accent.

Looking forward to reading the book - had the pleasure of seeing Gaiman at his recent NYC signing, and he completely sold me on it -a very entertaining evening that you can read about here!

[Greg McElhatton]

Very nice interview! One question, though--are we missing a word or two here, or am I merely dense? I can't figure out in the final paragraph what this means: "We’ve got at least one of the original artists saying he doesn’t want his work reprinted unless he does."

[Anders Wolleck]

Originally Posted by Greg McElhatton

Very nice interview! One question, though--are we missing a word or two here, or am I merely dense? I can't figure out in the final paragraph what this means: "We’ve got at least one of the original artists saying he doesn’t want his work reprinted unless he does."

i think gaiman means that the artist could very change his mind

[Kolimar]

Great interview. Lots of interesting information.

[Justin M. Campbell]

They Might Be Giants is doing the Coraline soundtrack?

After "Where's Neil When You Need Him?" I'd rather it was Rasputina, honestly.

[Fletcher]

I can't believe what a dork I am somtimes. yeah I went to the website mentioned in the article. I even claimed a space.
Now what I would like to see is if Neil Gaiman can reprint the Gloden Age when would he do it? When the rights to the rest of the series is cleared up? When McFarlane pays up? When? Because like he said I do not really want to spend 500 dollars to read the books.

[Kolimar]

Comic book creators and their work in other fields. What do you think?

The complete list of comics-based movies

The Complete List of DC Comics Movies

[lovelyivy]

Originally Posted by nietoperz

I really can't wait to get my hands on this book. Gaiman is one of my heroes, he truly is: not just a favourite writer but someone I would really love to sit and have a conversation with one day.

Amen. I was thisclose to flying back to NYC just to go to his book signing last month.

The ONLY good thing about working at Harper Collins was getting multiple copies of all of his books and giving them to my friends to read, lol. And talking to people who'd actually met him.

[Kolimar]

Originally Posted by render man

Great interview! I didnt know there were so many Gaiman movie's in the works. I'm really hyped for that Death movie if its ever made. And Stardust I can't wait to see.

You would have known if you had been reading the right threads: see above.

[Michael Heide]

Originally Posted by Greg McElhatton

Very nice interview! One question, though--are we missing a word or two here, or am I merely dense? I can't figure out in the final paragraph what this means: "We’ve got at least one of the original artists saying he doesn’t want his work reprinted unless he does."

Original Artist doesn't want anyone to reprint his work. The only exception would be Original Artist reprinting the book himself.

That's how I understand it.

And I love the Where's Neil page. It's beautiful, and a great concept.

[LunarDaydreamer]

The UK cover of Fragile Things is soooo much nicer than that.

[AladdinSane]

I'm shocked. I found Neil on my second try.

[welshjohnny]

They shot it mostly on Pinewood Studios and there was some location stuff in Scotland and Iceland.

Actually, the village used was Castle Combe, which is in the West Country of England, about twenty miles from Bristol and Bath.
Beautiful place, in the Cotswolds.
Can't wait to see the film.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Neil a few years ago. Great guy, outstanding writer.
Um, has anyone else noticed the caricature of him as one of the plagues in the latest Fables?

[Anders Wolleck]

Originally Posted by welshjohnny

Actually, the village used was Castle Combe, which is in the West Country of England, about twenty miles from Bristol and Bath.
Beautiful place, in the Cotswolds.
Can't wait to see the film.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Neil a few years ago. Great guy, outstanding writer.
Um, has anyone else noticed the caricature of him as one of the plagues in the latest Fables?

so youre objecting to what neil said?

[welshjohnny]

so youre objecting to what neil said?

Hi Anders.
No, I'm not objecting to anything Neil said. I'm just pointing out that the exteriors of the village were actually shot in England, while other parts of the film were in Iceland or Scotland.
It was probably just a slip of the tongue. Neil in his producer's hat probably never got down this neck of the woods.

I'd never contradict Mr Gaiman.
And no, I'm not being sarcastic.
And I don't work for the Cotswolds tourist authority.
Can't wait for the film - especially as some friends got to be in it. Lucky sods.

[Dougy]

I pre-ordered this through Previews and is waiting for me to pick it up at the comic store. I actualy really loved Mirrormask, I bought it via import from Amazon before it was released localy here in Australia. I also got the Aussie edition which comes with a really sexy slip case.