Interview with Author Neil Gaiman on Coraline
Henry Selick Directs Laika Entertainment Adaptation of Bestseller
Feb 2, 2009
Neil Gaiman's Coraline is an anomaly in the otherwise pasteurized world of children's literature: a creepy blend of Stephen King and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Coraline Jones was a deliberately ordinary heroine, with no real powers or special destiny, who had to escape a nightmare world using only her wits.
Now Laika Entertainment and Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, have made a stop-motion adaptation of Coraline, coming out on February 6th, 2009.
In Part #1 of this round-table interview, a visibly exhausted Gaiman discussed how Henry Selick came to be involved, and Gaiman's own contributions to the film.
How much were you involved in adapting Coraline to the screen?
“I was involved in some very huge and very specific ways. The most important was, when I finished writing the first draft, I sent it to my agent and I said, ‘I want this on Henry Selick’s desk.’ That was in late 2000.
“Henry read it before it had been illustrated. People say to Henry, ‘Why weren’t you influenced by the Dave McKean illustrations?’ and Henry says, ‘I read the story 18 months before Dave had drawn his illustrations!’
“Then Henry did his first draft, which was incredibly faithful. I said, ‘Henry, you have to open it up because otherwise you just have a little girl who never says anything to anybody while walking down corridors.’
“Then Henry’s option expired, and big sharks started circling Coraline because by that point it was a bestseller. At that point, I gave Henry a free option and I told him to cast Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. Those are my big contributions, and I was there as a sounding board whenever he needed me.
“I think there are two ways to make films out of your stuff. Way #1 is you do it yourself: you write your own script, you direct it, if possible you set up your own financing so there are fewer opportunities for people to mess with you.
“Way #2 is, you find the person you want to do it, and someone you trust, and you let them get on with it as much as you can. “
So what was it about Henry Selick that made him the guy?
“In November of 1993, I went to see Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and noticed that it was directed by Henry Selick. And being literate, and talking to friends about how much Tim actually did on the film and what Henry did, I got a really good idea of what he was about.
“When James and the Giant Peach came out, I noticed that, with Nightmare Henry was left to get on with it, and with James people were breathing over his shoulder, saying, ‘I don’t think that’s appropriate for kids.’
“But I loved that Henry seemed to feel the same thing that I feel about children’s fiction: lights shine brighter in the darkness, and if you’re going to give somebody an opportunity to be brave, there better be something worth being brave against.
“Have you ever had to watch The Disney Channel, and the kind of plots that are deemed acceptable on that channel? Let me give you an example: somebody thinks that everybody’s forgotten their birthday, But they haven’t because they were planning a surprise party all along! And everybody loves everybody and then they hug.
“It’s almost like pornography (everybody laughs). It presents this vision of an impossibly hospitable world which children know doesn’t exist.”
Kids know there are dragons under the bed.
“They know there are dragons out there in the world, because there are kids who will come along and take their milk money. Kids know that there are monsters: let’s tell them the important thing which is that monsters can be beaten. Tell them you can be brave, tell them you can be smart,.
“Coraline doesn’t have magic powers, she doesn’t have anything special other than that she’s smart and she’s brave and she’s scared and she keeps going, and she does the right thing.”
When I’ve spoken with authors in the past, they’ve often said that each story they write answers a particular problem or a particular test in their life. When you began Coraline, what was the challenge in it for you?
"Mostly I wanted to write a story that my daughter would like.
"If you’re an author, your kids don’t actually believe that you do anything for a living. And you definitely don’t do anything that interests them. And I had a small, Wednesday Addams sort of daughter who liked stories with strange mothers and cellars and dank places and creepy stuff, and so I started to write her one. And then I realized I hadn’t written anything for 5 years, and I’d better get a contract otherwise it would never be finished. So I sent it to a publisher, and my editor called me up and said, ‘So what happens next?’ and I said, ‘If you send me a contract, we will both find out.’
"I wanted to tell my daughters big, important things, like ‘being brave does not mean that you are not scared.’
"When I was a kid, I thought I was a coward because I’d be scared sometimes. And I thought that, if you were brave, that you were never scared. And then I said, ‘I don’t think it means that: I think bravery is when you’re scared and you do it anyway’ because if you’re not scared, then there’s nothing to be brave about. Being not scared is something anybody can do, but being brave: that’s doing the right thing.
"It was desperately important to me that Coraline was an ordinary little girl. When asked who this book was for, I answered, ‘It’s for brave little girls of all ages and genders’ and I guess I still think that.”
(In Part #2 of this interview, Neil Gaiman discusses some of the differences between his book and Henry Selick's film)
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