EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: NEIL GAIMAN (BEOWULF)

I’ve interviewed Neil Gaiman before, and he’s always one of my favorite people to talk with. He has a wide range of projects and an even wider range of interests and knowledge, so there’s always something he’s willing to chat about. And if you’ve ever heard Gaiman speak you know that he’s not just a writer, he’s a real deal storyteller, the kind of guy who would spin tales around a fire a thousand years ago. Having him write a version of Beowulf is fitting, as he might be the nearest thing the modern world has to an ancient scop.

A quick note about this interview: Gaiman talks about some specific details of this adaptation that are spoilery. I don’t consider details of the original story of Beowulf – the oldest story in the English language – to be spoilery, but there are some things that he and Avary do with the story that are new, and shouldn’t be given away too much. Just mouse over the black sections of text to read the spoiler-laden content.

I was the last person to talk to Gaiman. I came into his room at the Four Seasons Hotel at around 5:30; he had begun his day at a 10am press conference, and filled the rest of the afternoon with an endless series of roundtables, followed by hours of one on one interviews. He stretched out on the couch in the room and launched himself right into the interview.

The roundtables are hard, and the roundtables are mainly hard because you wind up going from table to table saying the same thing. The [one on one] interviews are fun, because everyone asks different things. And it’s especially fun at this stage of the game. I only saw the film properly for the first time last night –

Me too. And it’s pretty incredible.

Yeah! I love the fact that, as far as I can tell, for the last month people online have been writing scathing reviews of a film that only exists in their head, which is a strange kind of mash-up of our trailer with 300 done with characters that look like they’re from a video game. And they hate it. It’s everything they remember from Polar Express mashed up with this thing that they made up in their heads, and I hope that those people get to go and see Beowulf, a film that is nothing like what they’ve been tearing up online. It’s absolutely it’s own thing. It’s absolutely a real movie, and I’m really proud of it. I saw it last night and it fucking rocks. It has more in common with The Lion in Winter than with 300, and it has some astounding performances. It’s a new thing, it’s not anything that’s been ever before, and I love that too.

In the new Absolute Sandman, you say that A Game of You is your favorite Sandman story because it’s no one else’s favorite Sandman story. Beowulf has been just as unloved in Hollywood for decades. Was that part of what attracted you to the story?

I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that Beowulf was a standing joke in Hollywood. I met Beowulf in all the wrong ways. I met Beowulf as a kid reading that terrible DC Comics Beowulf, Dragon Slayer. I was interested enough, even though it wasn’t a very good comic, to pick up the Penguin Beowulf translation just to see what the comic was based on. I read the Penguin translation and went, ‘This is really fucking great. This would make a cool movie.’ And I didn’t know that it was world literature. I just thought it was this thing they based a comic on. From my point of view I was just reading a story, and it was great as a story. I always assume – which is probably a bad post-modern habit – I always assume my narrators are unreliable unless I learn otherwise. So I was reading it going, ‘Beowulf, you head off searching for the monster’s mother and you disappear for eight days, you reappear eight days later carrying the monster’s head but not the mother’s – I wonder if there’s an element of textual unreliability going on here. I wonder if there’s something else going on here.’

I phoned Roger in early 97 to find out if he had recovered after having resigned and then immediately being fired from [a Warner Bros film adaptation of] Sandman. I know that he worked for a year and a half without pay, and I thought that was really fucked, so I phone him to see how he is, and he says, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m just pulling out my old stuff. I have my notes here from a Beowulf movie I want to make.’ I said, ‘I love Beowulf!’ He said, ‘Well, here’s my theory on Beowulf. I want a beautiful seductress.’ I said, ‘That’s what I always wanted to do!’ And he said, ‘I have the idea that Grendel is Hrothgar’s son.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s brilliant.’ He said, ‘But I have this problem with what to do in the third act.’ And I said, ‘Well, if Grendel is Hrothgar’s son, then the dragon would be Beowulf’s son.’ There was this pause, and Roger said, ‘When can we start?’

You were in Hungary this summer visiting Hellboy II. Did you get to see the Troll Market?

I missed the complete Troll Market. I got down to see them building the Troll Market, but I was off doing other things for the whole of the Troll Market sequence. I got back for the Golden Army Chamber and the whole of the denouement battle, which was rather wonderful. And I’d seen a bunch of other stuff early on.

What did you learn from Guillermo?

I think the biggest thing I learned from Guillermo was almost an intangible. I thought I was going to learn a lot of nuts and bolts. A lot of times, Guillermo would talk to me and say, ‘Neil! You must understand the concept of never breaking the axis.’ I’d say, okay, explain that to me, and by the time he’d go through the whole explanation I’d say, ‘Oh, I know that from comics.’ I’d think it would be something really complicated that I would never understand, and then he’d explain it and it would be something we did in comics forever. So that kind of stuff I expected to come away going nuts and bolts. Really what I learned watching Guillermo was how he would take a shot from being almost good enough to being perfect, and how quickly he would do it and the sequence with which he would do it. If it was me the first thing I would fix would be the actors and the performance, but that wasn’t the first thing he’d fix, the first thing he’d fix would be the camera. He wouldn’t even worry about the performance in the first two or three takes. All he cares about is making sure camera is doing the thing he wants it to do. The moment the camera is doing the thing he wants it to do and he’s comfortable with that, then he goes in and works on the performance. Watching him throw things away and watching him create things on the fly when he had one more shot to get and he would have to get it in one take because they didn’t have time and he would have to make up the scene because it wasn’t actually in the script. Watching how he got from the point where I would have said, ‘Good enough for jazz, daylight’s coming, let’s keep moving’ to the point where it was, ‘That was fucking awesome’ would sometimes only be another two takes, but he would always guide those two takes. He wouldn’t get it good enough for jazz and then do another two takes for the sake of doing another two takes, he was always guiding it somewhere. That’s what I think I learned most from watching Guillermo.

Where are you now with Death, especially with the strike?

Right now we’re on strike.

You don’t have a finished draft?

We have a finished draft but – I was looking forward to rolling up my sleeves post-Guillermo, but I realized one of the things about the draft is that it has some scenes I don’t want to shoot. And I thought, ‘I should fix that. I should rewrite them into scenes I want to shoot. And I can.’ I would watch the way Guillermo would tailor material towards himself as a director, and it was like how I would tailor things for an artist. I would give them things they like to draw and they’re good at drawing, and that will make you look good. I thought I should actually do that with this script and me as a director, which I wasn’t doing. I was writing it for a hypothetical director, and now I need to do a me as director draft. That’s really the next thing that has to happen. But that’s just personally. We’ll see. There are lots of things happening on Death, but they all seem to be contingent on each other and there’s nothing I would feel comfortable talking about for fear of jinxing everything.

How different is writing a script like Death than writing something like Beowulf with a collaborator? Or is it different from working with artists on comics?

I like collaborating. Writing novels with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. The Sandman Mystery Theater I wrote with Matt Wagner. Working on Beowulf and then working on Black Hole with Roger, were both incredibly pleasant because he did things I would never do, and I did things he would never do. Working on Beowulf one thing that was a lot of fun for me was that Roger would write big, grandiose speeches and I got to do that sort of John Lennon thing, going in and putting the nasty little line immediately afterwards. So Roger would write ‘The sea is my mother, and she would not take me back to her watery womb!’ and I got to give Wiglaf a line like, ‘Well, my mother’s a fishwife and she’d rather I die in battle.’ It’s fun. It’s not like Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, it was created by this weird two headed beast made up of Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. And a lot of it was written by me, at least in the first draft, for Roger. I wrote more of the script than Roger did, but I wrote it for Roger who was going to be directing it.

How have you guys been approaching Black Hole? It’s an interesting book because it was serialized over such a long period of time that you can see the story evolve and morph.

What we did with Black Hole was we broke it down into chronological order and then told it out of chronological order – much like Pulp Fiction. Normally you’d be worried of being accused of ripping off Pulp Fiction, but considering Roger wrote Pulp Fiction it’s one of those things we’re actually okay on! But we did have to put it in chronological order to figure out the story we would tell out of chronological order. The hardest part about Black Hole is the ending, because you can tell the ending he arrives at is not the one he set out for ten years earlier, and tonally there are some huge shifts. We handed in our second draft and I’m not sure we’ve nailed it yet. I think we have a very good script, and when the writer’s strike is done we look forward to going back to it.

Looking at Black Hole as a work that was so effected by being serialized, and looking at your own grand work, Sandman, which obviously evolved over the years that you wrote it, where do you stand on the debate of comics as serialized pamphlets versus comics as books telling one full story?

I fall on the side of artists and writers being able to eat while creating long works. The traditional way of subsidizing that is by serializing, much as Dickens did. I think in Dickens’ case, the idea of going to Dickens and saying, ‘How do you stand on publishing a chapter at a time in Household Magazine or putting it into books?’ would have been a really silly question. You obviously publish a chapter at a time because you have an audience and it allows you to put food on the table between books. I don’t see any moral superiority to owning a comic over owning a collected story. I’m currently rereading the entirety of Bone for an essay that I promised I would do on Jeff Smith and one of the things that’s really coming home to me is how being a monthly comic did the story of Bone no favors. I was reading it every month when it came in – bless him, Jeff put me on the freebie list very early on after I wrote him an introduction – and I would sort of be able to follow stuff, but things that when you read the entirety of Bone over the course of a couple of days you get to and go, ‘Oh my God, that’s who that was, that’s what happened, Jesus Christ.’ As a monthly comic when you’re paying off something that was set up four years ago it’s just, ‘Oh, she’s cut into two parts and she’s… dead. And she’s… an old lady. Okay.’ And you keep reading. It doesn’t have the same amount of power. Having said that, if Jeff had tried to do the full 1200 pages of Bone and tried to publish it, [Jeff’s wife] Vijaya would have had to work very hard to keep a roof over their heads and then he would have taken a completely unknown quantity to a publisher and said, ‘Will you publish my 1200 page graphic novel,’ and they probably would have said, ‘No.’ Because the economics would have rendered it far too problematic.

But today nobody serializes novels the way Dickens did except as a novelty. Do you see a world where the economics would be such that the next Jeff Smith could create the next Bone as a 1200 page book?