Ask anyone if you can make a terrific-looking fantasy film laden with special effects for $4 million, and they’ll laugh in your face. You might as well ask if Tom Cruise can stop grinning, or Angelina Jolie can keep her hands off her co-stars. But then Lisa Henson, the daughter of the Muppet king Jim Henson, didn’t ask just anyone: she asked the comic-book writer/artist duo Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.
And they are used to thinking six impossible thoughts before breakfast.
There were many moments when they had cause to regret saying yes. Their already tightly budgeted £2.5 million turned into £2 million almost overnight when the dollar collapsed. While they were closeted in the Muppet Mansion in Hampstead cooking up the storyline, Gaiman would keep suggesting ideas while McKean would keep patiently explaining, “with sad, puppy-dog eyes”, why they couldn’t be done on the budget. And as the eight months McKean envisaged spending on the effects with the 15 young art-school graduates he hired stretched into 17 months, his helpers dwindled to four.
But the results are spectacular — enough that Mirrormask, which was intended only to go straight to video, will open in selected cinemas on Friday after gaining raves on the festival circuit. Gaiman recalls that after one screening to Sony excecutives they sat stunned until one summed it up: “That was like Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, on acid, for kids.”
The narrative arc may be familiar from Wonderland to the Secret Garden via Narnia and all children’s fantasy points in between — rebellious teen finds entry to parent-free fantasy world where she overcomes her demons and accepts adult responsibilities before returning to reality — but the alternative universe McKean has created is like no other. Closer to Svankmajer or Miyazaki than to Hollywood, its creatures are alternately sinister (human-faced cat-sphinxes), funny (pencil-beaked gorilla-birds), and even touching: two floating stone giants’ millennia of marital equilibrium are disrupted when their clasped hands are forced apart — causing one giant to drift up into the sky, the other to sink inexorably into the earth. It’s altogether the most inventive use of a shoestring budget since Terry Gilliam brought a foot crashing down on the Monty Python logo.
“The secret,” says McKean, who, aptly, is now a friend of Gilliam’s, “is that photo-realistic animation is expensive. King Kong is expensive. But I didn’t want that. I found my animators were well trained for an industry that wants real centaurs with real musculature. Why does it? They’re not real, they’re myths! I’m more interested in tone, in sculptural qualities. Right at the start I took all the animators to an exhibition by Henry Moore to get them in the mood.”
Needless to say, scrimping is not the usual Hollywood way — a fact that hit home to Gaiman (writer of the Sandman comics and several novels) on his most recent project: a $90 million motion-capture animation of Beowulf directed by Robert Zemeckis. “I got very worried about an airborne dragon battle sequence I was writing, and how expensive that would be to film, so I phoned up Bob Zemeckis and he was very reassuring. He said, ‘Neil, don’t worry — there is nothing you can possibly write that would cost me more than a million dollars a minute to film’.”
These days, with enough money and enough computer power, anything is possible. That’s why the histrionic visions of superhero comics have become so important to Hollywood, and why creators such as Gaiman and McKean are being courted: they are used to thinking big. The X-Men franchise is heading for No 3, with Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer painted blue as the Beast; Batman got a new lease of life last year from Christopher Nolan; Superman is being resurrected this summer by Bryan Singer.
A decade ago, Frank Miller, the creator of the influential Batman: Dark Knight comics, told me after scripting RoboCop II and III that he was fed up of film and going back to comics: “There’s no limit on your imagination, you have complete control, and as long as you have some pencils and pens, you can create any universe you like.” Last year the director Robert Rodriguez persuaded him to relent, and as anyone will know who has seen his extraordinarily faithful adaptation of Miller’s pulp comic Sin City (a sequel is out this summer), films can now create universes every bit as dark and rich.
But with great power, as the man once said, comes great responsibility. And not all directors who are given what Orson Welles called the world’s greatest train set know what to do with it. One man who has learnt this lesson the hard way is Alan Moore, by some distance the most celebrated of all graphic novelists. The first time I interviewed him, back in 1987, his anarchistic fable V for Vendetta had just been optioned by Lorimar, and the film producer Joel Silver had picked up his chef d’oeuvre, Watchmen. He had also made his one and only stab at a screenplay — Fashion Beast, merging the life of Christian Dior with the story of Beauty and the Beast, which was commissioned by Malcolm MacLaren but never made.
As the years have passed, he has become more and more opposed to the infantilising influence of Tinseltown.
“Comics and literature still leave a lot of work for the reader to do,” explains Moore, “so are more truly interactive. You have a choice about how quickly you read it, how long you linger over a panel. Film and television are both immersive media, there’s no such luxury — you are dragged through at 24 frames a second, and you are not allowed to imagine anything. Whereas literature is the highest possible technology: it’s virtual reality right there, 26 letters rearranged in certain forms which, when decoded by the average human mind, can re-create a complete wraparound 3-D environment.”
There is a pizza parlour in Northampton that has served more producers and directors than Spago in Beverly Hills. Since Moore would never travel to LA for a meeting, the truly determined will make the pilgrimage to Moore’s home town, where the yeti-coiffured, ring-bedecked giant will politely sit through a meal before giving each oleaginous executive the same simple answer that he once gave to Terry Gilliam when asked how he would adapt Watchmen for the big screen: “I wouldn’t.”
