Hey folks, Harry here licking my lips at the thought of these projects.... Ooooh, and will some super genius please give Terry Gilliam $15 million dollars... Jesus Cristo, support the gods of film... Hell I bet those NIKE soccer commercials cost more than this. Life is so not fucking fair. MAKE THIS STUFF HAPPEN!!!!
Thought you'd be interested in a new interview in which Neil Gaiman talks about the statuses of his current film projects:
It's all on page four of the interview which starts at CLICK HERE FOR THE WHOLE INTERVIEW!!! IT'S REALLY GREAT!!!
Here's the movie portion of the interview:
DE (Slush): I just want to spin through the movie projects. Good Omens will never happen right?
Neil Gaiman: Oh, Good Omens may happen. The whole thing about movies is that you never say it might or might not happen until the first day of shooting, and then it's happening. And even then you’ve got your fingers crossed. There is a great script by him and Tony Grisoni. They got the budget down to $65 million and they raised about 50 million dollars from abroad. All the investors wanted was for an American entity to go in on the final $15 million and guarantee an American distribution deal. There is the problem…they can’t find one.
There's no American with the balls enough to agree to fund it and have a Terry Gilliam movie. They are scared of him but he's funny, wise and brilliant. Not only that, but he made Twelve Monkeys and The Fisher King which demonstrated that he could easily bring in a movie on time and under budget.
Currently the last e-mail that I heard from Gilliam is that Tony Grisoni is doing a rewrite to try and get the budget down to $45 million.
DE: I wish I had $15 million to give to Terry Gilliam to make the movie.
NG: You know what? So do I. That's the single most frustrating thing. You want to walk around Hollywood asking everyone where are their balls.
So it's not dead until the option is not renewed and the option just came up and it was renewed again. I got the check.
You never know what happens with a picture until you're sitting there eating popcorn at the premiere.
I wrote a script for Beowulf with Roger Avary [writer/director of Killing Zoe and writer of Pulp Fiction] in 1997. It was immediately bought by a major studio for a lot of money then put immediately into production. They even signed up the special effects people. They were one day away from flying to scout for locations in Canada when somebody at the top of the studio read the script, hated it, and pulled the plug. I won't tell you the studio.
It was one of those things of how close something can come to happening and easily not happen. Oddly enough it may happen because Roger made a film called Rules of Attraction. It’s hot and everyone is asking him what his dream project is and what he wants to do next. And he says, “The Beowulf script I did with Neil.”
The joy for us doing Beowulf was doing Trainspotting in 4th century England. They’re all drunk on mead, with blood and dirt everywhere and swearing. We took our cue from Jabberwocky and Monty Python and the Holy Grail but more serious. They now want to greenlight Beowulf as long as it can be PG like Lord of the Rings.
DE: I know a Modesty Blaise movie was just finished kind of under radar [directed by Scott Spiegel]. I had heard you wrote a script for that a few years ago.
NG: What they hired me to do a few years ago was a screenplay for the second Modesty Blaise movie [laughs]. They wanted it to be a franchise and I would adapt a story called I Lucifer.
With the Death: High Cost of Living movie, a lot of patient and kind people are waiting for me to send in a second draft. I got my notes about the first draft the day before I went on the book tour. Then September 11th happened and I didn't feel like writing a story about Death wandering around New York City. It was supposed to be in San Francisco after that but I moved it back to New York.
Ask me about more movies.
DE: The Neverwhere screenplay for Jim Henson Productions?
NG: They've got Vincenzo Natali [director of CUBE] attached to it. They've been waiting for him to be free for a year and a half.
DE: Murder Mysteries?
NG: David Goyer did an amazing script for Dimension Films and they didn't get it on a sort of fundamental level. They put it into turnaround and Goyer got the rights back. I have no doubt someone will pick it up.
DE: Here is something really old: The David Lynch radio drama?
NG: I don't think that will ever happen. I actually took some elements of it and put them into American Gods. Like the car on the ice.
DE: I think all the goth kids' heads would explode if that happened.
NG: I think you're right.
Books of Magic is doing brilliantly right now. Last thing I heard was that they are ready to go on it. The director is named Nick Terry, I think. He's a French director with a script by Matt Greenberg. They had to un-Harry Potter Tim Hunter but I think they've done it wonderfully.
Jim Henson Production has also commissioned me to write something for Dave McKean to direct.
DE: Would it be live-action?
NG: Part live-action and part animated.
Then, of course, the big one which looks closest to happening of everything is Coraline, which is my next novel which is another children’s book I wrote with some Dave McKean illustrationing. It comes out in June.
When I finished the book I gave it to my agent who printed two copies of it. They sent one to Tim Burton and one to Henry Selick. I don’t know if Tim read it but within a week Selick had read and closed Bill Mechanic [An independent producer, who was once chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox Film Entertainment from 1994 to 2000] on it. Henry has written some brilliant drafts of the scripts. It’s currently out to a top actress for the main character.
DE: Jennifer Connelly. [laughs]
NG: She was on our list but it’s someone actually odder. I think Coraline may be in production very soon.
