Neil Gaiman on Hollywood - Interview
Author Wrote Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Stardust
Feb 3, 2009
In the early 1990's, Neil Gaiman went to Hollywood to get the apocalyptic comedy Good Omens adapted for film. Embittered by the experience, he wrote "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories" (published in the 1998 collection Smoke and Mirrors), a scathing critique of the Hollywood system.
Over a decade later, Gaiman has taken Hollywood on his terms, convincing like-minded people like Henry Selick and Matthew Vaughn to direct film adaptations of his award-winning novels.
Currently promoting Henry Selick's version of Coraline, Gaiman details why he returned to Hollywood, and how he avoided getting "chewed up and spat out by the system."
S101: You wrote “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories,” which painted such a bleak picture of writing for Hollywood. After Beowulf, Stardust and now Coraline, how have you come to terms with the system?
Neil Gaiman: “The first thing that I did . . . actually, the best thing that I did was write “The Goldfish Pool” because everybody read it.
"Bright young men and women have been going out to Hollywood for almost 100 years, convinced they were smarter than the system and that it couldn’t be that stupid. They thought they could go out there and – by virtue of doing good work – win. And they have been chewed up and spat out by the system and they sometimes wind up making bad things. A lot of the time they don’t make anything.
"You talk to people who have been out there on the fringes for a while; they went out there with integrity and now they don’t have it. And they hurt.
"So, after the events of “The Goldfish Pool,” I went home. I said no to anybody from Hollywood who came calling, and did Neverwhere for the BBC.
"Once that was done, I thought ‘Now I’m going to do Hollywood the right way.’ Which was figure out how things worked, and get a really good, solid Hollywood agent. One who understood who I was and was not trying to turn me upside down, wring me out and get the last drop of juice out of me quickly but was perfectly content to have me as a client for a very long time and willing for me to say no to all the ‘Would you mind rewriting this hack script?’ requests that came my way.
"And I slowly built up a network of people that I trusted and wanted to work with. I’ve been doing that for 12 years and overall I’d say it’s worked very well. There are some other things in the pipeline, some of which I can talk about and most of which I can’t, which are being done in more or less the same way: finding people I like and doing it slightly outside of the system. Even Stardust and Beowulf were actually done outside of the system.
"You can learn from your experience, but you can also learn from your friends’ experience, because your friends are walking through the minefield ahead of you and you go, ‘Ah-ha, don’t tread on that. (laughs)’
"Watching for example: Alan Moore. When I first knew Alan, he was quite excited by film. And then he edged over into, ‘Just give me the cheque. I’ll have nothing to do with it but at least I’ll have the book.’
"But the trouble with that point of view – the one that says, ‘I am not getting involved’ – is you wind up with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (laughs). You wind up with a film that is such a horrible, shambling travesty of this elegant, brilliant thing that you created, and now people think that’s what you did.
"And, if you’re Alan, you eventually get to the point where you say, ‘I don’t want my name on here, I don’t want the money.’"
S101: And for you, the way around that was figure out how the system worked?
“Figure out how the system worked, and work with people you like and trust, and have that be much more important than the money, because money evaporates very quickly. Also learning to say ‘no.'
"For example: in 1997, Bob and Harvey Weinstein came to me, and said, ‘We will give you $3 million for the rights to all of your short stories and we could make a maximum of 12 movies, and we would control the rights.’”
We’re just talking about my prose short stories, the stuff in Smoke and Mirrors. Three million dollars then as now, is a lot of money and then – unlike now – would have been a life-changing amount. I thought about it for a bit, because it was astonishingly tempting, and I said 'no' because I would not have had control of these things, and why would I let them go? It just seemed wrong.
"That was a wonderful, immensely liberating moment: saying ‘no’ to all that money. And it was nice saying, I obviously cost more than that. But what was more important wasn’t the control, it was the choice: I wanted to see Henry Selick’s Coraline, which is my primary purpose for keeping it going."
S101: Why do you think Coraline resonates in a market that likes the easy style of story? It’s complicated on so many different levels. Why do you think it's touched so many people’s lives?
“Because I think people respond to Story with a capital ‘S.’ It’s why Snow White has lasted, it’s why Wizard of Oz has lasted. It’s why The Nightmare Before Christmas: a film that was released in 1993 and Touchstone Pictures more or less washed their hands of it. It was not expected to be a perennial, it was 11 years old before Disney admitted that it was a Disney film. It’s why things like that last.
"And it’s also why Halloween is probably the biggest and coolest holiday on the North American continent. People like that stuff.”
Hopefully you enjoyed this 3-part interview with Neil Gaiman, which also includes this news about his next film adaptation, The Graveyard Book. Look for a review of Coraline coming this Friday)
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