MIRRORMASK: AN INTERVIEW WITH NEIL GAIMAN AND DAVE McKEAN

MIRRORMASK, an interview with Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
By Ken Leicht

Recently I visited the Jim Henson Studios in Hollywood and had the pleasure of interviewing the creative forces behind MIRRORMASK, the new fantasy film from Samuel Goldwyn Films and Destinations Films, and produced by the Jim Henson Company. I realized soon after I arrived that I hadn’t ever stepped foot on this particular lot. It definitely looks like something out of a time capsule. Likely owing to the studio’s historical landmark status, there’s not much in the way of Muppet-ness about the place save for a giant Kermit coming out of the walls of the only building that seems to have been built after 1930.

After a little sandwich courtesy of my hosts, it was on to a round table discussion/interview with writer Neil Gaiman and director Dave McKean. Both have been, up till now, mostly known for their graphic novel and comic work but increasingly are being seen as filmmakers.

They were brought before us by the publicist one at a time. First up was Neil. Neil looked pretty much like I imagined, with the black tousled hair and such. And he was about as cool as I expected. The first question from the press gang was about darkness in children’s lit and that’s where we shall begin…

Q: Why do you think so much dark media and literature involves children? Or rather why does children’s literature have a dark side?

N: I think because children respond so well to that stuff. I think children have very, very clear ideas about good and evil. Adults are much more morally equivocal than kids. It would be very hard to give an adult a story like the original version of Snow White. You wind up with the queen being invited to the wedding and then being forced to dance in red hot iron shoes that had burned until she burned and her heart exploded and she dies in agony. You tell this story to kids and they’re nodding. (Acts out) Absolutely! Wicked people should be punished. And the adults are going “yes we can sorta see her point of view and that’s really rather cruel.”

And kids have no problem with Hansel and Gretel’s witch being pushed into the oven. Nor with the idea that the witch has been fattening Hansel up to eat him. These are stories which if there was a kid’s equivalent of the Federal Communication Commission (who had the power to take these stories out of circulation); had they not been grandfathered in; they wouldn’t allow you to tell the traditional Grimm’s fairy tales to kids. I’ve never met any kids who particularly responded to stories with no darkness. They like good. They like evil. They like problems. There is a reason why most people absolutely remember and love the great WB cartoons in which some character is trying to kill another character and is normally painfully hurt continuously through the performance of this while they can barely remember even having watched those sort of PBS-y cartoons in which everybody loves everybody and then maybe somebody thinks that maybe somebody doesn’t love them properly and in the end they all have a hug.. That stuff…you know you’ve watched it. You were sat in front of the screen while it happened and it just (left your mind)…while you can remember the look on Wile E. Coyote’s face as he discovered that he’s halfway across that canyon and he’s run out of road. That’s something you will never forget and I think that’s all part of the same thing.

At this point one of the others jumped in with a seemingly pretentious literature question but Neil, being the well read genius that he is, was right there with the answer;

Q. Like Bettelheim?

N: I always thought Bettelheim was very simplistic. I love fairy tales and I love fairy stories and I love classic stories. I think that Bettelheim did a disservice to the Grimm’s stories by saying “this is what they mean…” Because I think the genius of most great stories is that they don’t just mean one thing. They mean an infinite number of things.

Q: …his philosophy that it’s memories of being a kid. (Sic)

N: A lot of it is my own memories of being a kid. Some of it is trial and error. My last children’s book with Dave McKean was a book we did called THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS about a little girl who’s scared that there are wolves living in the walls of her house and how her family reassure her that actually it’s just mice or rats or the creakings of old houses. Actually, they’re wrong and it’s wolves and one night the wolves come out of the walls and they drive the family out and take over the house and it’s about how the kids get their house back. What I love about that is that adults find it a tremendously potentially scary book. They’re convinced that children need to be protected from this.

Kids on the other hand are convinced that there are things like wolves living in the walls of the house. It’s not like you’re giving them ideas and they perceive it as a book about a family triumphant over something like that. It’s like with MIRRORMASK. People have said “How do you feel about the fact that kids may be scared of the Dark Queen’s head when it’s appearing…and its huge, writhing hair tentacles?” …or whatever. I remember my most vivid coolest memories of being a kid at the movies were actually ducking behind the seats when the witch came on screen in the WIZARD OF OZ and watching and peeking up and going down and peeking up and going down.

Q: You find that pleasurable?

N: It’s still vivid.

Q: It affects different people in a different way.

N: It made it a real movie for me. It made THE WIZARD OF OZ, [something] that as an adult I still remember as having real substance. You know I think in things like that and things like SNOW WHITE, the original Disney one, there are places in there where Disney set out to terrify and succeeded brilliantly. There’s nothing we do in MIRRORMASK which even is a hair as scary as anything in Snow White.

Q: I know this project wasn’t born specifically from a graphic novel per se but do you feel that Hollywood in general has had a harder time; or why have they had a harder time coming to grips with adapting more graphic novel material as opposed to superhero stuff?

N: I don’t think there’s much difference. At least in my opinion. You’ve got as many AMERICAN SPLENDORS and GHOST WORLDS as you have anything else out there. You don’t have that many and you really don’t have that many superhero movies in terms of proportion. I do think that what you tend to get with comics and graphic novels going on to the screen, which is something that I have no particular explanation for, is that the success or failure of the movie seems to be absolutely dependent (with one exception which was MEN IN BLACK) on how close the thing actually is to the original source material. Which fascinates me.

I knew the CONSTANTINE movie was doomed [the moment it was announced]. I remember being in this room in San Diego with 8000 people and it was the Vertigo panel and this was the big announcement. Karen Berger, the editor, gets up and says “Okay there’s going to be a John Constantine movie,” and everybody goes (does comedic large intake of breath), “…and it’s going to star Keanu Reeves.” Everyone goes (acts deflated) Uh…oh.” It wasn’t an “ooooh!!!” It was an “oh” from 8000 people going “No. He’s blonde and he’s English and that’s not our film.” It was just like saying “Okay, it’s going to be a Batman movie but he’s going to be in a fuzzy pink costume and you get the same kind of “oh.” And I don’t know why that is. I don’t know why that’s true. Things that really work…things like SPIDERMAN…look like the comic. It feels like the comic and in some ways its better than the comics but it’s very, very faithful. Or GHOST WORLD, again it feels like the comic. But I think that why Hollywood loves buying comics and sometimes making them is just because most executives don’t have imaginations and the lovely thing about a comic is they can look at it and they can see it and see the pictures and they don’t have to read a whole novel. Or even read a treatment.

Q: If it is more simply laid out, why do they have such a hard time with SANDMAN for example? Why has that been in development hell forever?

N: Cause it’s a 2000 page story. And because the only way you’re ever going to make it well is by… actually there’s two reasons. Both of which are true. One of which is, in the case of SANDMAN, is it’s a 2000 page story and the first question is what do you throw away and how do you shape this into something? It’s only now with the success of something like THE MATRIX and the HARRY POTTER movies that they’re starting to go “Well maybe we can make a series of SANDMAN movies and not have to try to make THE Sandman film which is this thing. So I mean that’s different.

The other thing is that Hollywood executives REALLY love them smell of their own urine. What they really like doing is urinating in things. And then going “Hmm now this smells really good.” And being really puzzled when the rest of the world goes “No, actually it smells like pee.”

A gorgeous example of that is the case of SANDMAN. Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio who did PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, SHREK, and some lovely movies were brought in by Jon Peters to write the first draft of the SANDMAN movie. They explained to me that he had explained to them that he had this theory…he hadn’t actually read any SANDMAN because he had people who did that kind of stuff for him. But he’d figured out that what a movie was going to need to be successful was a giant mechanical spider. And that he wanted a giant mechanical spider because that would make any film a hit.

Elliot and Rossio, who had read SANDMAN, were going in with their pitch and looking forward to this huge thing, are going “But there’s no room for a giant mechanical spider” and he said “this is going to make the film. I know it. I’m John Peters. I want my giant mechanical spider.”

And in fact I was thrilled on going to see THE WILD, WILD WEST to see that he had finally put his giant mechanical spider; that I’d been hearing about from Elliot and Rossio for five years, into a film with no ideas of any kind in it. I really think a lot of it is these guys are wedded to their giant mechanical spiders and they’re also convinced that they know best. Because they’re Hollywood executives.

The joy of MIRRORMASK [is] I wrote it for writer’s guild basic…actually below that, writer’s guild TV basic, or direct to video basic so that was technically 1 1/30th of my quote in Hollywood at the point, but Henson’s was able to offer us an incredibly simple deal which was pretty straight forward which was “We can pay you absolutely nothing. You’re going to be working for basic BUT nobody is going to tell you what to do.”

Q: So you got the deal before you wrote the script.

N: That was the offer from Lisa Henson. She said “This is the deal. We want a film like LABYRINTH, like the DARK CRYSTAL, like those Henson films we made back in the 80’s. We think it would be a good thing to make a family fantasy movie now. Those films cost $40 million back in the 80’s. We have $4 million now. All we can offer you is that you will never have to sit there at a table while a bunch of people in suits tell you how you’re going to change your script. Write us a script, we’ll sign off on it and we’re in business.” And that was how it worked. The simplicity of that.

Q: What was the final cost on it?

N: $4 million. That was all we had. In fact, what was horrible was it dropped. Because the $4 million dollars, when we got the green light, was 2 ½ million pounds and that was what we budgeted at But thanks to George Bush’s handling of the economy, by the time we actually needed the money, it was actually 2 million. The dollar had dropped. In essence we lost a million dollars. It had gone from a five million dollar budget to a four million dollar budget because of the drop of the dollar so yeah we brought it in for that.

Q: Aside from “we want something like those films we used to make” Was that pretty much it? They said you can go do whatever you want?

N: That was our brief. LABYRINTH and the DARK CRYSTAL were not perceived as successes when they came out. In fact they were perceived as failures. Both of them, when they came out, had gone on first in video and then on DVD to become films that generation after generation discovers. They’ve become essentially classics. Her [Lisa Henson’s] attitude was Henson hadn’t done anything like that since Jim died. “We have $4 million dollars. That’s all we’ve got. We’d like to make one.” And she phoned me up and I said it’s impossible. But she said “I’ve seen Dave McKean, the films he made in his mother’s barn. The short films.” She said “Do you think he could do it?” I said “I don’t know but I could ask him.” And she said “I know we couldn’t afford you to write it but maybe you could come up with the story.” And I said “No, if Dave says yes to directing it, I’m going to write it.” Figuring, why should I miss the fun? So that was our brief. It was this incredibly simple brief. Please write a family friendly fantasy movie and bring it in for budget which is nothing.

Q: So given that was all they gave you, where did the idea come from for the story?

N: We had like 2 weeks and we both brought a bundle of ideas along. I had sort of an idea that I’d love to do something about a sort of prince and the pauper-y idea…a girl who was somehow split into two girls who became one at the end. Dave had this idea of the girl and who was part of a traveling theater and her mother getting sick and she had to go off on her own. Dave preferred the idea of a circus ‘cause it was more interesting visually. And he had the idea of the masks and the two mothers.

Q: What about Helena specifically, she has a lot of Sara’s DNA form LABYRINTH but she also has this really unique attitude I hadn’t seen in a kid’s movie.

N: We talked about what we liked about LABYRINTH and one of the things that we both really responded to as parents of daughters was the fact that its about a girl who is at that point in life where you have girlhood on one hand side and young womanhood on the other and you’re making a bunch of decisions and you’re sort of internally processing a bunch of stuff about what you are and who you are and whether that’s what you want to be.

So for me the key to Helena’s identity was that line right at the beginning where her mother says “lots of kids would like to run off and join the circus.” She says “Good, I want to run off and join real life.” And I can hold on to that. That’s an attitude. And what was finny is when we handed in the script. The immediate response form the Sony people was “We don’t quite get Helena because sometimes in the script she’s reacting like a kid and sometimes she’s reacting as a young woman” and like , well, YES! Do you have daughters?

That’s the whole point of when you’ve got a 14/15 year old or even a 10/11 year old. You’ve got points when they’re 25 and points when they’re 6. There are points when they are young woman and there are points when they need a hug. And I love the idea of concretizing that metaphor. Making this all happen at that cusp moment where she was really under the gun and under a tremendous amount of pressure.

I loved the fact that she’s an artist and she’s genuinely creative which is helped by the fact that Dave McKean did all of the art. [He] did all her drawings. But it came down to the joy of creating Helena and creating the Boshi anti-Helena and giving her this wonderfully sketchy sidekick who wasn’t really a boyfriend…was just wonderfully flaky.

At this point, all too soon, the publicist comes and whisks Neil away. Later, after stealing a photograph of Neil posing with a dinosaur friend, I got to ask a few questions
on my own about Neil’s other projects. First, I asked about the challenge of adapting BEOWULF, the classic monster poem into an animated motion capture film for Robert Zemeckis.

Q: BEOWULF? That’s a pretty daunting challenge to take something that was a poem. How?

N: I don’t find the poem challenging because BEOWULF is fundamentally a story and it’s a wonderful story and it’s in three acts which is so gorgeous about it. In act one Beowulf gets to fight Grendel. In act 2 and it’s him and Grendel’s mother. In act three it’s him fighting a dragon. It’s taking that shape and building it into something I hope fairly immediate; something that actually turns out to be about consequences. Finding reasons for the third act to follow along from the first two was really what I enjoyed about it most.

Q: Back to MIRRORMASK, it was a great achievement and it will certainly turn some heads in town. Do you think its going to lead them to a lot more of your work, to look at it, and maybe conceptualize it happening more?

N: I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff that’s out there. Henry Selick’s CORALINE has a green light and they're currently making that over there (at Paramount). For years there was an article in the Hollywood Reporter about how I was the person who had the most properties optioned and not made by Hollywood. These days that seems to be changing as more and more of them get made. I’ve gone from being the person whose had most optioned to somebody who’s got a fair number of movies. You know what’s weird is that if everything that’s meant to be happening happens I’ll have five films out in 2007 which will be very odd indeed.

Q: Was what you said about SANDMAN true? Are they possibly considering doing some films?

N: They’re certainly looking now at the current crop of fantasy films [and that has] given them a different model as opposed to initial model. But the film that will probably happen next is we’re doing DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING over at New Line with me directing starting in early spring.

Q: Thanks for extra questions. And good luck with all of it. I’m looking forward to seeing more of your stuff. And BOOKS OF MAGIC would be great if that ever got made.

N: They’ve got the script over at Warner's. That’s one of those ones where I just sort of look at it and hope that they make a good script. I’m a consultant but I’ve discovered that you can consult but they don’t have to listen.

Q: I think MIRRORMASK will help them to listen…that and indirectly SIN CITY

N: I hope so. I think both of them sort of got across something (about) what you can and can’t do in cinema right now. Just the idea that it can now be as personal as the inside of somebody’s head.

Q: Thanks, I appreciate it.

N: You’re very much welcome.

Next, it was time to meet Dave McKean. Dave appeared tired. Which was bad for him because he still had a whole press day ahead of him.

Q: What’s your favorite part of the movie?

D: The fact that it’s over now and I don’t have to do it anymore. (Laughs) I quite like the giants segment. I like that bit and I quite like the “Close to you” song, the robots.

Q: Whose idea was that, the “Close to you”? Where did that come from?

D. (laughs) I picked Neil up from the railway station to drive him to Jim Henson’s house so we could start writing and I had brought a CD of JOHN ZORN. He’s a New York avant garde sax composer and he put together a CD of Burt Bacharach songs and they were all pretty strange arrangements and we just loved “Close to you.” We started kicking ideas around …about how it sounds like a robot singing inside your head and then it became a whole roomful. Almost all of the scenes in the film came from odd places and so that’s where that came from.

Q: What about the giants. Where did they come from?

D: The giants came from a software demonstration. (Laughs) I went to a DEMO of a (computer) program and it was a pretty dry demo so I had a sketchbook and I was doodling. At one point the person who was demonstrating picked up gravity as a property and applied it to something on screen which suddenly fell and hit things. I thought this was magic. I imagined the sort of two things which were gravitationally attracted against each other so they would hover and if they were pulled apart they would fall. It came from that. It seems to suggest the sort of married couple …they live in harmony all the time together and they are forced apart. That’s what happened in the script.

Q: In Hollywood everyone is concerned when there’s adaptations of material specifically from the comics realm and the fantasy realm. Everybody talks about whether it was loyal to the material and characters and story but they don’t talk about the art, the look of it or whether it makes it to the screen or not. A lot of time Hollywood brings in its own designers. In this case it was all you. Obviously you had more freedom; you weren’t being interfered with as far as your look.

D: That’s the way it went. We wrote it to be a film. It wasn’t an adaptation or anything but obviously it’s a painterly collage-y world with my look. That was the deal really. When Lisa called to talk about the possibility of making the film, the upside was that we had complete creative control and we could just do the film we wanted to do. The downside was he had to do it with a tiny, tiny bit of money but that was fine.

Q: At no time did anyone say “No” that’s too much at all?

D: Nobody said that and it’s to Lisa’s credit really. I was a bit unsure at first. It seemed like a strange partnership. It’s got the Henson logo in front of it (but) it’s not a Henson film. It’s got no Muppets and puppets. The Henson Company didn’t do any of the effects or anything like that but I think she realizes that it’s got a lot of Jim’s spirit in it. He never talked down to anybody. He always had a kind of wit, wisdom in his writing, the Muppet Show and all of those sorts of things. And just a joy in communicating to people.

Q. The music in the film is really interesting. It’s sort of jazzy at times. It’s sort of hip hop at times. Helena's name is put into the music. Was that your idea or the composers?

D: The composer is a mate of mine Iain Ballamy. He’s one of Europe’s best jazz sax players. He’s obviously never done anything like this before. I wanted a musical landscape that never quite settled on anywhere geographically or time wise as well. I wanted that feeling. The city has bits of European cities: Warsaw, Trieste and Venice and bits of all sorts of places It’s a strange collage-y dream place. And I thought Iain could do it. I just trusted that he could do it. Plus he’s done a lot of circus music before. He played at circuses. He just seemed to be perfect for it; and I really like it. It’s very strange. I really like it. It’s a very strange eclectic bunch of keys but I’m happy with it. I kind of understand where people think it a bit odd but that’s my taste.

Q: Was it done with a music program or was it recorded live?

D: No we had a strange way of going about it really. Again, we had such a tight budget we couldn’t get an orchestra and do it the usual way so we had to think of ways of doing it[cheaply] so what happened was I involved Iain right at the start of the process. It’s a very long process. It was about 17 months and it was very frustrating for Iain because the alien kept changing and shots would go in and come out. Pieces of music that worked perfectly (suddenly didn’t). It was very frustrating. We had to think of a way of actually recording this for the budget for the time and practicalities. Iain got together with a programmer so that everything could be quite fluid on the digital line. Most of the instruments are real. Iain knows just about everybody so anytime if there was a great Cymbeline player coming through London we’d [get] in his dressing room and pull out a microphone and get him to record some things and describe some things that he would imagine (like) the street; the mist; (the) skippy spider. He would just record some stuff. We got a fantastic singer from Norway, a virtuoso accordion player coming thru…just because these guys happened to be passing thru London on tour with their various bands that Iain was in touch with them all the time and we could sort of snag them and get a bit of work done.

Q: How much of imagery was in the script?

D: Some of that stuff was in the script. I ended up doing 20 or so very broad images to accompany the script to give people an idea of how it was going to look. I think the biggest jump was I didn’t want it to look completely realistic. I wanted it to have a painterly illustrative feel to it because it’s a wall full of drawings; it’s a dream in her head and pointless to be slavishly realistic about it.

Plus a lot of that stuff to be honest was improvised on the day. I had a very loose working relationship with all of the animators. We would get in in the morning and start working on the film and play with it and push up all the buildings around. If we needed a tree we could get it. We’ve got a model of a fly. Put it in the ground, we’ve got a tree. It was that very sort of loose and playful. If you’re working on something for 17 months it can get just painfully laborious doing things yourself. It’s nice to have a bit of fun. So a lot of the stuff was hanging in the air. We’d just place them, then sit with them, have the model; (it’s a 3d space inside the computer) and just throw things in. Move it around. Make it a bit bigger. Make it a bit smaller. Stretch it here. All that. Then render it off in layers and we’re done. I just made it up and it’s all my stuff so there was never any worry that it wouldn’t fit or wouldn’t mix

Q: When you dream, is it this world you dream in or is it your creations that inhabit your dreams?

D: My dreams are a mixture. They do have that sort of strange collage-y fragmentary nature to them and maybe I’m visualizing them in a particular way….interpreting them in a certain way. I suppose that’s why I like these kinds of images. Very often if I’m talking to you in my dream then I turn round, I’m in Venice. And it s that sort of dream logic that makes perfect sense in a dream and then you have to find a way to interpret that for a story or for a film.

Q: Are they merchandising the film?

D: There are some toys which I won’t go into but there are some books. The script and storyboards. I storyboarded the whole movie so that book has been out for a while. There’s a children’s picture book all written from Helena’s point of view. So she’s right in the center of it. It’s her story written by her. The book that I’m really very happy with is an art book with all of my paintings and drawings and then the models, the development stuff and stuff that inspired[the film]…my photographs of European cities I like. Just for this film and that’s a great thing sort of full color. I'm really happy with that.

Q: You had mentioned the budget got tight, and got tighter. Do you think that was ultimately good? That it taught you a discipline that you might not have otherwise had and would help you in future times when you have more money or was it just…you couldn’t wait to have more money?

D: No. I thought it was great. I really like having a ceiling. I like having bars to push against and there were three parts to the brief. It had to be made for this amount of money. It had to be a family film. Not too gory. And it had to have a fantasy element. That was non specific. They didn’t want to see LABYRINTH again. If we could go away and think of something that we’d want to do for that then we could do it. So we felt that was a wonderful brief. We knew our territory and it played straight into things that Neil and I were talking about anyway… particularly Neil’s fascination with a certain type of rite of passage stories and all those things. It played right into my fascination with a particular atmosphere and that kind of particular feeling in a film where you start and you don’t know where you’re going to go. You have no idea what’s going to be on screen in ten minutes time. And I love it when that happens. It’s quite rare.

Q: If you had more money, would it have been different?

D: No. Money buys you a degree of stress relief I suppose. It was actually pretty miserable making it because it was just so difficult to get the computers to like each other and play nicely with each other and just getting the data around. Just all the technical side was always a crush. But I don’t think the look of the film, would have been very different. That’s my look and I’m not interested in making things that look photo real or fluid. That’s where the money goes. It’s very time consuming. Very technical and it’s a great achievement if you can do it but it’s a very narrow achievement cause it all can’t go in there. And if we had ten times that I think it would still have had that collage-y, painterly, hand-made look. I was interested in it looking like an individual made it.

Q: There are children growing up who saw LABYRINTH, became teenagers and read yours and Neil Gaiman’s comic books. Now their children are going to watch yours and Neil’s movie and they’ll become comic book readers. How does that make you feel?

D: It’s great and that’s the interesting thing about those two films…Jim’s two films. They were made by an individual and they gathered a generation upon generation of people discovering and realizing that. There’s a lot of astonishing, well made films around but they’re made by sort of committees and computers and corporations. I think Jim's stuff was always great because he was the hand inside the puppet. Look at this photo up here (refers to a cool b/w photo of a silhouette of Jim Henson holding a Kermit puppet). He was the hand in the puppet. And that went through all his work. That sort of direct human communication.

At that moment, the publicist returned and our time with Dave McKean was over…though I did meet up with him again later and got in a couple more of my own questions in. I asked him first about his involvement in the Broadway musical of Anne Rice’s THE VAMPIRE LESTAT.

Q: How did they approach you about LESTAT?

A: It was out of the blue. I’m directing the films that they’re using in the show and then designing the whole look of it; the stage and everything. The director who’s directing the actors…collected my photographs and called out of the blue and wanted me to do it.

Q. What’s next for you directing wise?

A. I’m hoping it’s going to be a film called SIGNALS TO NOISE. Neil and I did the book together…which we always liked but we never quite felt that we got it right and then we did it as a radio play and again it was better but we didn’t quite get it right. So but now I think the film will be much better.

With that my day at Henson Studios came to a close. I really enjoyed MIRRORMASK. I hope it does well enough that it will inspire more fantasy films from the Henson Company and will cause the vast amount of Gaiman/McKean projects which are currently in development to come to fruition.