Coraline Interview with Neil Gaiman

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Mania Interview: Coraline's Neil Gaiman

The groundbreaking author talks to Mania about life, art, and the making of Coraline

By Rob Vaux February 09, 2009

Author Neil Gaiman sits down with Mania to discuss CORALINE(2009).
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Along with Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman is one of the titans of the comic book industry. Starting with his Sandman comics, he has repeatedly defied the notion of what the medium should be and found new ways to expand its possibilities. His reputation soon allowed him to branch into novels, television and movies… including the screenplay for Beowulf, the fantasy fairy tale Mirrormask (created with his frequent partner Dave McKean) and a big-budget adaptation of his book Stardust. His latest Hollywood collaboration is a stop-motion version of Coraline, which was directed by Nightmare Before Christmas maestro Henry Selick. Gaiman spoke to Mania.com during the press day for the movie about Coraline's creation, the process of getting it to the screen and ways of avoiding the pitfalls that have ensnared others in his position.

Question: Tell us about the genesis of this story. You originally told it to your daughters?

Neil Gaiman: It was never one of these stories that you actually- it wasn't a bedtime story. My daughter Holly--and she's now 23--but at the time she was about 4 or 5, and she was the kind of Wednesday Addams kid who would climb on my lap and tell me stories. She would dictate these stories about little girls coming home and finding their mothers being impersonated by evil witches, and being locked up in cellars and having to escape and find their real mothers while the witches came after them. So I thought I would write a story that she'd like and that's really where it began: a story that Holly would like. Something that would be scary enough for her, because she was the kind of kid who loved things to be a little scary. Her favorite movies were The Wizard of Oz and Jan Svankmajer's Alice--that was the kind of five-year-old we had.

I wrote the first 10,000 words, the first third of the book. Then we moved to America and I ran out of time. I remember reading her and her brother the first 10,000 words. Then I put it away, and I got too busy with other things. Eventually I thought, "This is not going to get written unless somebody is waiting for it, and right now, the only person who is waiting for it is me. But Holly is getting too old and now Maddie's born (my new daughter), and I've got to get on this." I sent it to my editor, a very nice lady named Jennifer Hershey. She phoned up and said, "This is great! What happens next?" And I said, "Send me a contract and we will both find out."

That would have been 1998, and it was about two years to finish it. I had a contract, but I still didn't have any more time. They didn't specify time in the contract. So what I did was I had a notebook by my bed and instead of reading 10 pages before I went to sleep, I would write 50 words. Basically, I'd get about a page done a week. But if you keep doing that for two years, eventually you finish a book. And I did. When the draft was done, I gave it to my movie agent and said, "Please get this to Henry Selick." I got a call about a week later, saying, "Henry read it, Henry loves it, and Henry wants to meet you the next time you're in town."

Q: It sounds like you always had stop-motion animation in mind for this. What is it about that medium that is so right for this story?

NG: I love the weird dichotomous relationship that stop-motion has with reality. On the one hand, what you're seeing is real. It exists. It has a tangibility and a reality that--no matter how good--no 2D animation or computer 3D animation has. Everything you're seeing on the screen is there. On the other hand, it is a created world. You have a level of artificiality that you wouldn't have elsewhere. Imagine a world in which you actually made Coraline live action--with actors with big black buttons for eyes--in which you actually got an Other Mother in her final form with those extra legs moving like this huge terrible spidery thing towards you. It would be like The Shining for kids. Whereas the fact that these things are not quite real--they're dolls--allows everything to mute down.

Q: Both this story and Mirrormask involve the notion of monstrous mothers…

NG: Yes, which is weird, because the plot of Mirrormask is Dave McKean's. Although Dave had read Coraline, it was very much his plot. I remember sitting there with him when we were putting together the script--I was basically writing dialogue to his plot--and saying, "This is pretty Coraline sometimes."

I think Mirrormask was very much about being on the cusp of womanhood. It was about leaving girlhood and coming to terms with your mother, and mother figures, and whatever else was going on in Dave's head at that point. I think Coraline is much simpler. There's all sorts of arguments that can be made for what it's about, and what the various mothers stand for, and the good mother and the Other Mother, and so on. But at the end of the day, Coraline for me is very simple. It's somebody up against a bad thing. And it's something that tells kids that you can be brave and you can be smart and you can win. You don't have to be special, and you don't have to be Harry Potter, and you don't have to have magic powers. You can go up against something and you can win. It also says that the people who love you may not get to pay you as much attention as you would like, and by the same token, the people who do pay a lot of attention to you may not have your best interests at heart, which I think is also a good thing to tell kids.

Q: Did you have any input into the casting on this one?

NG: I had one huge vote, and I was so firm and definite on it that Henry just did it. It was French and Saunders. At that point, Henry didn't even know who Dawn French was. He called up to say that this thing was going to happen. I said, "Good. You will cast Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders as Spink and Forcible." And he said, "Okay." So that was easy.

Q: You've had a very successful relationship with filmmakers adapting your work. Why do you think that is? Is there something in your approach?

NG: One of the best things for me in this business is getting to watch people walking through the fields ahead of you. Sometimes they let you know where the landmines are, and sometimes they do that by treading on one and getting their leg blown off. Watching, for example, Alan Moore's experience with movies. Alan Moore is a dear friend of mine, he's been a close friend for 25 years. His attitude was always [affecting Moore's cockney baritone] "The comic book is the comic book. Just give me the check, make your movie; it has nothing to do with me." It was a fine attitude, except that by the third adaptation that he hated, he was saying, "I don't even want the money, just don't put me name on it." To the point where it no longer matters for Alan if the Watchmen film is good or bad. He wants nothing to do with it. He's been burned too many times. He hated From Hell. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was an embarrassment. He doesn't want anything to do with the film.

I didn't want to go there. That seemed to me like a path through the landmines. If people are going to film my stuff, what I want to do is… it's like finding like a good babysitter. At the end of the day, you don't want to say, "You know when I left her with you, she did not have a tattoo on her cheek." You want to get your baby back looking beautiful, so you have to find somebody you trust. Henry is somebody that I trust. Neil Jordan is somebody that I trust with the Graveyard book

There are some things I just say no to. Twelve years ago, I got an offer from Miramax. The offer was basically, "We want to buy the rights to all of your short stories and we will give you $3 million. We can make them into movies or do TV or whatever. Here's cash, give us stories, what could be better than that?" I remember thinking about it for a week, maybe two. It was a lot of money to me back then. It's a lot of money now, but back then, it was a life-changing amount of money. And I said no. I said no because from that moment, I would have had no control. I couldn't have said, "Please don't do it like that." You could have seen terrible things made, with my name on them, that I had no control over. And I didn't want that.

Q: Do you ever get pressure from your representatives or Hollywood to repeat yourself or do something a certain way? To do something "just like Coraline" for example?

NG: [smiles.] They wouldn't dare.