Interview with Neil Gaiman

FWOMP: What about reading? What did you read early on and what do you read now?

Neil Gaiman: Now I’m cracked. I don’t have time, which is a terrible thing to admit. In fact, I realized the other day that about the only author I genuinely read for pure pleasure is one of the worst authors in the world, a guy called Harry Stephen Keeler, a long dead American mystery writer. He was probably the greatest bad writer America ever produced. The reason I read him is because I know it’s not work. Anything else somehow seems like I’m working but when I read Harry Stephen Keeler I know it’s not work.

When I was a kid and a young man I read everything. When I was about 23, I was incredibly lucky in that I wound up with several book review columns, which meant that I had to read huge amounts of stuff that was outside my experience and outside my comfort zone. I think every young writer should be forced to read the kind of stuff they would not normally read for pleasure. I’d be assigned articles on big body stripping bestsellers so I’d have to sit down and read several dozen of these things and then suddenly I’m being given hardcore gay fiction to review and I’m thinking, "This is well outside my comfort zone." Having said that, it was actually kind of cool to have read it and then have it in my arsenal so that whenever I needed something like that I could just whip it out . . .as it were.

I do remember the year I stopped reading fiction. It was 1992 and I was a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Awards. I judged in both 1991 and 1992 and you had to read every single work of science fiction, or associated material, published in the United Kingdom. So I was really good, and I did . . .for the first year. The second year, 1992, I’d do the read three pages bit, then literary toss it over my shoulder. And it was like some kind of horrible aversion therapy. It took me three or four years after that to start nervously sidling up to books and opening them. Even today, though, a book cover with a spaceship on it produces a faint panic. And it was having to read everything that caused it. Bear in mind I thought I was inured to bad writing because I’d done, as a very young man, a book called Ghastly Beyond Belief, which was the science fiction and fantasy book of quotations, especially concentrating on the bad stuff. Which was enormous fun.

FWOMP: That must have involved an incredible amount of research.

Neil Gaiman: Yes it did, and I’ll tell you that it was the reading of Lionel Fanthorpe that helped me with that book. If you read enough Lionel Fanthorpe, your brain starts to turn to jelly and just dribbles out of your ears.

FWOMP: Thanks for the warning.

Neil Gaiman: You’re welcome.

FWOMP: Let’s talk a bit about your Sandman Chronicles. What do you think it was that struck a nerve with the comic book readership and helped launch this series?

Neil Gaiman: You can start making lists of why Sandman did what it did and the number one reason I see is that it was the right time. You had a generation of readers who were about my age—I was about 26 years old when I started writing Sandman — who loved the idea of comics but didn’t have anything to read. They learned how to read comics but stopped when they were about sixteen or seventeen. They felt fondly towards comics and suddenly there’s nothing for them to read. And the fact that there was a comic that spread almost like a virus. It spread from person to person. It even spread sexually, which is kind of cool. I started doing book signings and large men in sweaty t-shirts came up to me and grasped my hand thanking me for bringing women into their stores. These female people, with breasts and everything, had gone into stores and bought Sandman and some of these guys still hadn’t quite got over this. It had this 50/50 male/female readership. The weird thing about Sandman was that we started in 1988, sometime in about 1995 the sort of Goth culture thing became mainstream enough that people started saying, "Oh, Sandman’s a Goth comic," which was surprising because I’d rarely seen any Goths in the signing lines. To this day I see very, very few Goths in the signing line. I’m quite fond of Goths but I just didn’t see many of them with Sandman books. I see as many grandmothers as I do Goths.

FWOMP: I’m being given the signal that we’re running out time but I think we’ve got time for maybe one more question. Many of your books have been optioned for film. Have you seen any footage and do you have any reservations or worries about them?

Neil Gaiman: Oh you continually worry! The worry, honestly, is because you’re not there making it. You can sign off on a script but you don’t know what’s going to happen.

I’m most interested in Beowulf of all of them. Because if it works it’s not going to be like anything anyone else has ever done before and if it fails it’s going to fail in really interesting ways. And I love that. I’ve seen footage, but because of the way these things are made, it’s more or less akin to watching Playstation characters do Shakespeare, in that they use very simple characters while they’re moving the camera around and making their edits and deciding where the shots are. It looks fascinating. It’s going to be the first animated film for adults given a major mainstream release in America. It’s got people in body suits doing the Andy Sirkus thing (Andy Sirkus was the man who put on the body suit for the Gollum character in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy—Ed.)

FWOMP: MirrorMask was done by the Jim Henson Company. Are they doing Beowulf, too?

Neil Gaiman: Beowulf is being done by Robert Zemeckis in association with Paramount and Warners and DreamWorks.

All I’ve seen of Stardust is a sequence between Robert Deniro and Ricky Gervais. And it was very funny and it just kept getting funnier and funnier take after take as they started improvising and playing off one another.

FWOMP: Who’s Deniro playing?

Neil Gaiman: Deniro’s playing a character that in the book is named Captain Alberic but in the film, for reasons which actually are explained, is called Captain Shakespeare. What the screenwriter did was take a section of Stardust and build it up, just like they did with The Princess Bride. You’ve got to find a spot to build up from then find your actors to fill those roles. And they built it up enough that it was going to be a Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, or a Robert Deniro in that part. So they sent it to Bob, he said "Yes" and suddenly we had a movie.

FWOMP: Okay, I think we’re out of time but I wanted to thank you for taking a moment to meet with me and do the interview.

Neil Gaiman: Well you’re certainly welcome and I’ll see you at the induction ceremony.