Henry Selick on Coraline - Interview
Focus Features Film Based on Neil Gaiman's Children's Book
Nov 10, 2009
Henry Selick's stop-motion adaptation of Coraline was one of the more enjoyable surprises of 2009: a wonderfully macabre fantasy that didn't try to water down Neil Gaiman's creepy bestseller.
Naturally, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas would try to maintain Coraline's Alice in Wonderland-meets-Edgar Allen Poe feel; the surprise was that (a) Focus Features didn't try to tone down the disturbing imagery, and (b) Selick created something that was different from Gaiman's book, but honoured it all the same. And this with the author's blessing and encouragement.
Suite 101 chatted with Selick at the 2009 Ottawa International Animation Festival, where he was exhibiting two characters from the film.
S101 (pointing at the Coraline and Other Father dolls sitting in the corner): What can you tell us about these?
Henry Selick: “These are the actual puppets from Coraline. They’re all handmade, in the same tradition as the original miniature from the 1933 King Kong movie. Inside, there’s a metal skeleton that we call an armature. It has precisely-made joints so that when you pose a character, they will stay in that pose. It is, after all, called ‘stop-motion,’ not drag or collapse-motion.
“On top of the metal, we use different material for skin: silicone, hard plastics. They’re hand-painted and the costumes are handmade. The hair is all individually placed: they’re animate-able (sic) with wires inside.
“We spent a lot of time making them work well and look good because, when we go in for a close-up, that’s what we’re going to see.”
S101: What inspired the look of Coraline?
Selick: “Well, the character of Coraline is in every scene, and I worked with 3 different character designers and sculptors, and it was a process of finding something a bit tomboyish. I wanted her face to be asymmetrical – like real people’s faces are – so it was about twisting her face a little, her pointed nose, finding a default expression. She doesn’t trust adults, so I wanted that in her basic character design; that she’s skeptical.
“I had a picture of Coraline in my mind ever since I read Neil Gaiman’s book, and when I got there, I knew it.”
S101: When I talked with Neil Gaiman, he told me he had sent you a first draft back in 2000. What was your reaction when you read it?
Selick: “It was delicious, a forbidden meal. Neil has the same sensibility whether he’s writing for older or younger audiences. I liked that he was bringing some dark twists and frightening details – like buttons for eyes – into a story for kids. I liked the collision between Alice in Wonderland-like tale – Coraline follows a jumping mouse into this other world – but then it turns into a Grimm’s fairy tale. He told it so well: he knows where to pause, he lets the audience imagine things, he doesn’t overly describe. I loved it from the start and I could see it as a movie almost immediately.”
S101: I saw a lot of M.C. Escher in The Nightmare Before Christmas; who inspired the look of Coraline?
Selick: “That’s hard to answer because it’s everything I’ve ever seen in my life coming together! (laughs) That includes a lot of (Federico) Fellini films, but it was more about finding a concept artist that felt right. I found that in Tadahiro Uesugi, a Japanese illustrator whose style is very graphic: it doesn’t look dimensional, and he’s influenced by early 1960’s American illustrators; that period before everything collapsed and went to photography.”
S101: Like Norman Rockwell?
Selick: “Norman Rockwell’s great but it was more graphic illustrators, those who put in that tiny spark of atmosphere to inform the whole picture. I didn’t want the film to be characters in a static world, I wanted atmosphere. A lot of atmosphere is tedious and hard to do, so I was looking for the detail in reflection: the mist in the background, the breeze moving 3 leaves, and I found that in Tadahiro’s work. His illustrations were a touchstone throughout the film. Especially for colour, and simplicity.”
"I've been living with this project for so long, there was this gauge in my head of what was right and what wasn't right. But pictorial influences like Egon Schiele, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse will always be bubbling in my brain.
S101: When you were making the film, was there a point that you felt yourself going off-track and, if so, how did you get back on?
Selick: “I never felt we were getting off-track, but it was very hard to get on it in the first place! (laughs) Especially in terms of the look: if you give someone a photograph of something, they know you want a hyper-realistic painting. But if you give someone a piece of Tadahiro’s work, it’s hard to imagine that as sets, characters and props. So it took a lot of experimentation, especially with materials: how do we make this so the light seems to come through things? We worked with a lot of plastics, handmade papers, all sorts of things: wire mesh, tubes that could be shaped. We had to do a lot of experimentation before we could get going in production.
“But, once we were there, we had two contests among the builders. The first one was: make this tree, and capture this feeling. So we probably had 20 different trees, and two of them were right. Then the bigger one was: make this house. It had to have this broken straight-line quality: no curves.
“So, getting on-track was the hard part, staying on-track wasn’t bad because we got the soup right and then, when everyone tasted it, it was ‘Oh, I get it!’ and then everyone was on the same page.”
(In Part #2 of this exclusive interview, Henry Selick talks about what it was like to adapt Neil Gaiman's bestseller for the big screen.)
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