| Author Neil Gaiman Is Blessed With Stardust |
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Page 1 of 3  "Stardust" is the first major film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's work--though a movie version of his children's book "Coraline" is currently in production   Director Matthew Vaughn, shown here at the L.A. premiere of "Stardust," also co-wrote the screenplay and served as producer  Charlie Cox as Tristran in "Stardust"  "Stardust" is not overwhelmed by its excellent special effects, but the flying ship piloted by Robert DeNiro's Captain Shakespeare is a showstopper  Claire Danes as Yvaine, a girl tranformed from a fallen star, in "Stardust"  Two Hollywood icons, Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert DeNiro, at the premiere The English-born 46-year old father of three first established his reputation and fan base by helping to revamp the concept of graphic novel with a strong sense of the mythic and vision of a personal mythology. That and a strong sense of humor helped make such series as "Sandman," "The Books of Magic," and "Stardust" such seminal texts for graphic story fans. The Minneapolis-based Gaiman has also written sci-fi inspired novels such as "American Gods" and "Anansi Boys," voiced audiobooks, and even relaunched other great comics such as the late Jack Kirby's series "The Eternals" for Marvel Comics, winning various awards in the comic and sci-fi fields along the way. Now "Stardust"--the grand coming-of-age story of a teenager, Tristan (Charlie Cox) who tries to win the cold-hearted Victoria (Sienna Miler) by bringing her a star (played by Claire Danes) that falls in the land of Stormhold--offers a broad tapestry that should attract a lot more than Gaiman's cult fandom. stardustmovie.comQ: What is the spirit or the heart of "Stardust"--what made it work for you as a book and what makes it work for you now, as a movie? NG: "Stardust," for me, is about a boy becoming a man, and it's about that classic fairy-tale thing of setting out to find something, to prove yourself. But it's also about that life thing—discovering that the thing you set out to find is very often not the thing you thought you were going to find. Going out on an adventure, whether in life or in fiction, changes you, and that for me was always the heart of "Stardust" when I was writing it. I wanted to write a story about a young man who sets out to find his heart's desire, and [finds] it wasn't what he thought it was. And what we've done with the film is compressed [the story] and squeezed it, we've occasionally done filmic versions of things I'd done in the book, and we changed the ending, which is something I knew we would have to do when I sold it to Miramax back in 1999. As an author, I loved writing the end of the original novel because it's enormously fun, its filled with lots of people missing each other and things that never hit in the way you expected them to. And it's enormous fun for a reader, who is seeing everything from above and knows more about everything that's been happening than the characters do. But I realized even then it could be incredibly frustrating to have that ending happen if you were a viewer of a film, because you'll be sitting there and expect all these characters to meet at the end and then they all miss each other and you go, "WHAT?! What the fuck was that about?!" Q: In making this transition to the film, have you been able to maintain a degree of control or input, or at one point do you relinquish that and get to see what they do? NG: Unless you're actually both directing and completely funding the film that you're making, you will have to relinquish control. But what I tried to do with "Stardust" was figure out a way that would allow me to get a film that I was happy with made. Having gone through various incarnations of the Hollywood experience now, I've sort of learned things you don't do. "Stardust" itself was first bought for the movies by Miramax in about 1998, '99, and went through an unsatisfactory development period, and eventually I got the rights back and just went, "I'm never going to do that again." And so for the following several years, people come to me and said, "We want to do a 'Stardust' film," and it would be directors or it would be beautiful young actresses who viewed it as a staring vehicle for themselves, and I would simply say no, driving my poor agent mad. And I continued to say no until I started talking with [producer, director and co-screenwriter] Matthew Vaughn about it. I'd already worked with Matthew on one project [in which] we reached a point, very briefly, where we had a small impasse where his producers wanted him to do one thing but we'd agreed to another--it was just a handshake deal--and for about a morning he was ready to do what his producers were doing and then filled me [in] and said, "That's not what we agreed to do, and I'm going to stick with what we agreed to do. I keep my promises." And although I don't think he knew it at that time, that was what got him "Stardust," because I thought that's really weird, a Hollywood producing entity who actually keeps his word. A few weeks ago I was asking a screenwriter friend about a producer whom he'd worked with, who got in touch with me about something, and I said, "Is he trustworthy?" And [my friend] said, "You're asking me if a producer is trustworthy. Isn't that rather like asking is this lion a vegetarian?" But in Matthew's case he was completely trustworthy, and that already had me interested. We talked briefly, he and I, with Terry Gilliam about doing "Stardust," and Terry had just come off "The Brothers Grimm" (2005) and wasn't going to go back to fairy tales for all the tea in China. And then the next thing I knew, Matthew, completely unplanned, ended up directing "Layer Cake" (2004) and then went off to do "X-Men: The Last Stand" (2006), and walked off "X-Men," went back to England, and I got a phone call from him saying, "I want to do 'Stardust, what do you say? We'll do it together." And I thought about it for all of about 30 seconds and I said yes, OK. I went out and found him a screenwriter [since] I knew I didn't want to write it myself, and also knew I wanted a screenwriter who I could trust to get the material and who would complement Matthew. Matthew is very upfront about the fact that he is pretty much a sort of boys' director, and what he loves and understands is the action stuff and the bouncing around, and--I think he's better now--but definitely going in on this he was much less comfortable with things like human relationships and love and all that kind of stuff. So I wanted to find somebody who really did have that, and that was Jane [Goldman]. After that my role mostly consisted of reading drafts and saying, "I wouldn't do that if I were you." At one point in November, two years ago, I flew over when we had a draft that was pretty much a shooting script, and Jane and Matthew and I sat in Matthew's study and Jane and I read the script out loud, trying to do it in a world in which I took males parts and she took female parts. But it didn't always work like that, and that was really educational because at that point there were a lot of places were I said, "You really don't want to do this because…" or, "Have you thought about doing this?" And some of the things I wanted him to change I was wrong about, and there were battles that he won because he was the director--which was absolutely the way they should be; it's his film. But at the end of the day I was incredibly glad with the film that we made. There were things that weren't there because the budget wasn't with us, but pretty much it's the film that we both agreed needed to be made. I did the [audiobook] for "Stardust" a couple years ago, and one of the things I learned doing that, that if you read "Stardust" out loud it's 10 ½ hours long, so immediately you get to the point of, "How can I compress this?" If you made the film, not only would it be 10 ½ hours long, but the hero wouldn't be born till a half-hour in--so how do we get him born pre-credits. |