Henry Selick on Neil Gaiman - Interview
Focus Features' Coraline Stars Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher
Nov 10, 2009
In 2000, Henry Selick received the first draft of a children's book from a hot young British writer named Neil Gaiman, with the idea that it would make a great stop-motion film. Nine years later, Selick – who also directed The Nightmare Before Christmas – made Coraline into a critically successful movie starring the voices of Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman.
In the previous installment, Selick talked with Suite 101 about getting the look of Coraline just right. In this installment, he discusses how Neil Gaiman encouraged him to change the story for the film.
S101: What role did Neil have during production? Since you were working from a 1st draft, your ideas were very different from how the book eventually turned out.
Henry Selick: “Neil did several very important things, the most important being telling me that my first draft was not very good, and why. One reason was: it was too close to the book, it was exactly like the book turned into a screenplay. I’d had a lot of communication with Neil along the way: such a damned good writer, it can be a little intimidating.
“What he said was, ‘You need to go off – we won’t talk – and you need to find your vision.’ It was like being pushed off a cliff but in the best possible way. There’s no author I’ve ever met who would do that, but that’s Neil. I did have to change things to get myself more comfortable with dialogue. The structure of the book wasn’t working, it needed to be reshaped, I needed to add a character to give Coraline someone to talk to . . .
“It went through a lot of stages and, honestly, I was afraid to show it to Neil because it changed too much from his book, and you know what? He loved it. And I thought, ‘Wow.’
“After that, I would wait until we had a new body of work – character designs, storyboards – and I would run it by him. And he always had one or two very important comments and they were always right.”
S101: What were some of those comments?
Selick: “Like, when Coraline’s parents are trapped behind the mirror and they breathe on the cold glass and write ‘Help Us’ – I thought the kids in the audience wouldn’t be able to read that; it would only be on there for a split second. He saw it in storyboards and he said, ‘No. Do it backwards like it should be, and they’ll get it.’ And it worked.”
S101: The biggest change you made to the script was introducing Wybie. Where did that character come from?
Selick: “It was important that he not compete too much with Coraline in terms of screen time and personality. In fact, there was a neighbor of mine; this really great guy named Wybourne, who’s nothing like the Wybie in the film. He was middle-aged, but he was like a big kid: very sweet, super-athletic, rides his bike all over the place, still surfing.
“I liked him and I liked his nature, so Wybie’s name and some of his personality came from that. As far as the look: there’s an artist that I work with a lot called Bill Boes: first time I met him, he showed up on a dirt bike with an old fireman’s jacket. So those elements blended together.”
S101: Another big change from the original book was how you handled the Other Father’s fate–
Selick: “In the draft I got, there was no outcome for the Other Father.”
S101: Yeah. Where did you get that outcome from?
Selick: “I started going down this path, and I’m glad I stayed on it: what was the symbol of Coraline’s being with her parents that she can’t get in her real life, but she can in the Other World? The gardening thing happened: Neil’s a very good gardener.
“So, Coraline wants to garden, and what do her parents do? They write a book about gardening, but they never do it. That’s what she wants and, in this other world, a garden comes to life just for her. I hadn’t yet figured out what the Other Father’s demise was, but by holding onto that symbolic territory of a garden, that told me where he needed to be changed and destroyed.
“We kept the same thing as in the book: he didn’t want to hurt her. Practically everybody on the Other World likes Coraline and hates the Other Mother. For me, the Other Father’s Fate in the book repeated what happened with Spink and Forcible. So I wanted something different for him.”
S101: Where did the idea of changing the colours when going from the regular world, which is so drab, into the Other World, which is very bright?
Selick: “That’s something that goes back to The Wizard of Oz; it was also done successfully in Pleasantville. But I didn’t want to overly rely on colour: what you’ll notice is there’s her real world, which is more drab and in this other world, there’s different versions of everything.
“We shot the movie in 3-D but, in the Real World, those sets were built with very little depth. They have crushed space: the floors are raked, the ceilings and walls are at steep angles. We don’t show that off, but shot in 3-D, they feel claustrophobic, ‘I gotta get outta here!’
“But then you go into the same room in the Other World, those sets have more depth, we added more colour so there’s a sense of freedom. We didn’t want to use colour in a garish way: that Cat in the Hat live-action film was way over the top. It hurts your eyes to be assaulted with too much 3-D, too much colour and strobing. I like to think we had a good balance of all these elements.”
(In Part #3 of this interview, Henry Selick compares and contrasts his working relationships with Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton.)
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