Going Underground with Neil Gaiman

First it was going to be a sewer. Then a deserted tube station. It might have been a tall roof in London or a deserted smoke-filled hospital. In the end we caught up with Neil Gaiman on the set of his new TV series, Neverwhere, in the depths of South London. Ex-journalist, comic writer, creator of Dream and Death, collaborator with Terry Pratchett, short story author, song writer, poet, anthologist; Mary Branscombe finds there’s no end to the work filling Neil Gaiman’s strange dark days.

There’s an Angel, called Islington, who lives in a cave full of candles, and the Earl’s court endlessly circles London in an underground train; there’s a post-modern vampire called Lamia, and a bodyguard called Hunter, guarding against the cut-throats Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, who have “A levels in Advanced Menace”. London below is a scary place, especially for Door, whose family has just been murdered and especially for Richard who tries to help and finds that his life is never the same again. Our hero is “definitely a goodie although he does tend to spend the entire plot wandering around going ‘what?’ and ‘I don’t know what’s going on’”. And there’s a terrifying beast (who’s really a bull called Albert). If you want to know what’s going on, you could wait till Neil Gaiman’s latest creation, Neverwhere, makes it on to BBC 2 in October, or you could tackle Neil’s ‘expensive’ imagination now.

When we arrive the producer, Clive Brill, explains how lucky we are to have avoided the sewers. “We have been filming in the dirtiest, coldest, most revolting places underneath and above London.” Neil on the other hand is all affability, warning us about the gusts of ‘smoke in a can’ that fill the set, occasionally “in quantity such that it was escaping from the sides of the building and the fire brigade got called. Plus we had little firelighters going, these little paraffin things on little tin trays on the walls everywhere, fires flickering and licking…” The set here is equally fascinating - one carriage of a tube train done up as a mediaeval hall, wolfhounds and all. Neil shows us around. “The idea is that it’s one of those carriages that you never quite know why they’re there - because all the lights are off and the doors never open and you think ‘what is that for? Does it just fill up a space?’ and our heroes find when they knock on the door of one of those that it is this mediaeval earl’s court. There’s a fireplace, there’s even a library round the back. It actually does have all the dimensions of an actual underground carriage and down there on the throne at the end we have Freddy Jones, or rather we don’t have as he’s off having lunch”. We don’t have the recalcitrant wolf hound either, as it’s having to be tempted onto the set with a handful of digestive biscuits. It’s the usual disciplined chaos of a film set, busy turning imagination into fantasy. I keep asking the owner of the imagination what Neverwhere is but it proves hard to pin down.

Beasts and earls and tube trains and angels? What exactly is Neverwhere?

“Part of the inspiration for me was as a child I always used to think of London as a magical city like Baghdad in the Arabian Nights, only weirder. And I pondered some of these names and I wondered who the Earl of Earls Court was and whether there really was a knight on the bridge of Knightsbridge. And whether they had clowns at Oxford Circus…

What I did was I just sat down and wrote the kind of thing I would love to see on television but have never seen, figuring people then would slap me down to size and what’s actually happened is that I’d ask for something impossible and then they’d get very very cold and very uncomfortable and work very long hours actually giving it to me.

So far I have made a very very very successful career out of writing the kind of stuff that I like. I don’t write things for a mass audience because I have no idea what mass audiences like or want. So I write what I’d like to see and often I find a very large number of people like that kind of thing as well.

Neverwhere is not a comedy, its not horror, it’s not a gothic - it’s a contemporary fantasy for adults which has some funny stuff in and has some scary stuff in and has some weird stuff in and has some exciting stuff in. There’s blood, there’s excitement, there’s weirdness; I think there may be a nipple or two.”

Are you worried people are going to try to pigeonhole it?

“I feel an enormous amount of sympathy for anyone who tries to pigeonhole it! My own suggestion has unfortunately been ignored - I suggested ‘not as scary as the (big letters) X Files, not as funny as (big letters) Red Dwarf!’ but they said no! I thought that was good positioning for it. Absolutely nothing like the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. It’s not like Dr Who at all!

Its strength is that there isn’t anything else like this and its weakness is that you can’t say ‘well it’s one of these’. It’s about this guy and then you start explaining London below to people and then after a while you just give up and say ‘watch it - and watch it from the first episode because it will make more sense’.”

If this one of the few sets, where have you been filming? Have you had problems finding locations?

“Well, we don’t have the money to build it so we’ve gone out and found it, like underground stations that have been closed for sixty years. We spent two nights filming on H.M.S. Belfast which is the sort of place where you think they’d automatically say no.”

So you’ve been around disrupting London?

“No! Apart from those poor people staggering off the Piccadilly line swearing blind that you wouldn’t believe what they thought they saw in the underground. The trouble was even with those few underground trains that went past quite slowly, you had to be looking in the right place and just following it with your eyes as you went, so you get one, two, maybe three people on a whole train who would have seen as far as they could see, a dinner party floating in the air with giant snakes and four people, who looked rather strange sitting around, having lunch, and huge candelabras - one of which blew over and smashed rather excitingly.

One of the things we have is the original London urban legend. You know about the crocodiles and the alligators in the sewers of New York? London for many years had a similar urban legend, that there was apparently a butcher in Fleet Street in the early 17th century who was fattening up some pigs and one of the piglets ran away and got into the Fleet ditch and disappeared off into London’ sewer system where according to legend it grew huge and very dangerous. Occasionally they’d send hunting parties into the sewers, trying to find it and they never did. People would go to look for it and they’d never come back. So we decided to put the giant boar into this and then we rapidly discovered that there weren’t any giant boars in England which made it rather difficult, so we have a beast that will be played by a bull called Albert. With make-up! Because he’s going to have tusks and old spears sticking out of his side

It’s not only a beast called Albert, it’s also a huge animatronic thing and it’s incredibly realistic. It’s something between a bull and a boar - it’s a boarish short of bull or a bullish sort of boar. It’s great, it’s wonderful and it will be going on to work with Diana Rigg.”

Did you find writing a script much different from writing a comic, or a book?

“Normally I think visually because I’m describing panel by panel; you’re writing a script; I think it’s much harder to write a good comics script than it is to write a good film script or TV script or whatever because you’re not just being the writer you’re also being the director and the editor.

Recently I’ve been approached by a few different Hollywood film studios who are interested in me directing stuff. To one of them I said ‘what makes you think I could direct?’ and they said ‘we read your script for Calliope in the back of Dream Country and it’s a shot by shot description of what you’re doing, of course you could direct’ which I thought that was very nice of them. Possibly foolishness, but very very sweet.

I’m currently writing the novel, out when the series comes out - which is a bit upside down, writing the novel once you’ve already written the script - and it’s fun because I actually know what happens so I never have to walk round going ‘well, I wonder what happens next’ because I did that for five years. I’m enjoying playing with the things that you can do in prose. Very often I look at something and think ‘no, I wouldn’t have done it that way’ or ‘hang on, I have the budget to do it another way.’” Clive interjects; “ultimately we’re restricted by the budget and Neil’s imagination is expensive.”

“An easy example of that is one place that we originally set the first floating market in the script and then lost because they have no sense of humour, was Harrods. I thought ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful to do this strange huge market in Harrods’ food halls' and we suggested it to them and they didn’t think it would be. And we thought 'there’s no fun in building Harrods food halls' so we’ve actually set it in Battersea power station now. But in the novel I thought ‘I can just go back and put it in Harrods food halls’ so we get this huge fight going on underneath the fish sculpture.”

So it’s all a nice break from comics?

“Actually DC do want to do the comic of Neverwhere. What I’d do is I’d give them the scripts and let them get on with it. We’ve also had a number of approaches from a number of different major film studios about doing Neverwhere the movie and I’m starting to go ‘I don’t know if I’d want to write the script’ - there’s a limit to how many times you can write something without getting really deeply and utterly sick of it. Right now I still like it, I’m halfway through the novel and I’m still liking it; I suspect if I actually had to sit down and do the comic script version or the radio version or something I would have had enough of it.

I’m talking currently with Warner Brothers, the film people, about maybe writing and directing a live action version of Death: The High Cost Of Living, filling it out a bit more. We may do it, we may not; they gave me a green light on it in October and then withdrew it immediately when they realised it might conflict with the Sandman movie… so we’ll see.”

Who would you like to see as Death?

“Don’t know. But I have to say that I don’t find the idea of interviewing every wonderful actress in Hollywood between the ages of 16 and 22 a particularly onerous one; there are things you do for your art, I could do that… dinner with Winona Ryder, lunch with Christina Richie, I could go through it, for my art…”

All this activity coincides neatly with the end of the Sandman comic which is what you’re probably best known for. Have you done everything you wanted to do with it?

“Sandman 75 is out tomorrow. And I did all the things that I wanted to do at the beginning and I stopped while I still loved it and I caught all the balls that I threw into the air while it was going on and I think it’s worked pretty well. There are some things that I regret but the things that I regret are specifically to do with just the logistics of bringing the thing out.

I did promise myself that I would quit before I had to get up in the morning going ‘oh god I have to do Sandman.’ I never got to that stage. I got very slow, towards the end and a lot of that was because I wanted to avoided what I’d done before. When you’re starting, it’s wonderful because there’s nothing you’ve done before. Every panel transition is new, every character, every line of dialog is completely new. When you get to the end you’re trying to figure out ways to tell stories that you’ve never done before and that gets a lot harder. When I began it took two weeks of every month and by the end it took six to eight weeks of every month to write.

But also, you get to do things like Sandman 74 with J Muth - the Chinese poem - it was the kind of thing I could only allow myself to do in the penultimate one, because it was just too weird; the only place I could ever do that is the one before last, because if they hate 74, what are they going to do? Stop reading?”

Of course the story continues, with your second Death mini-series and after a fashion in The Dreaming. Are you involved with those stories at all?

“No what I have done is read them as they come in and sometimes I like them and sometimes I don’t. Really it’s leaving people the idea of the Dreaming as a playground and see what they do with it. I do plan other things - by the end of the next decade I would like to have done something for each of the Endless, that would be fun.”

And what will you be doing first?

“Right now what I’m planning on doing is all the stuff that I had to put off until Sandman was over. There’s a lot of things like Neverwhere, like novels, like movies, where I’m going ‘ooh! I can do one of those now that I haven’t got a monthly comic to write’. And I still like comics and I can go back. I think if I’d had to stay in comics for another couple of years and not been allowed to go off and do anything else, I could see myself getting up one morning and going ‘oh fucking comics, I don’t never to write another one’ and that would have been that. Everything else is prose right now, or film, or TV, except I have to do a comic strip for Oscar Zarate. Oscar is doing this book about London and Warren Pleece is going to draw this eight-ten page story; that should be fun.”

So was it a relief to do something different, with comics like Miracleman and Angela in Spawn?

“Angela was such fun to do, it was complete and utter mindless silliness and it was a wonderful relief to do too. At that time, if I could get a page of Sandman done a day, I felt very very happy. On a normal day I’d get three quarters of a page of Sandman done and it was hard fucking going. And then I was offered Angela, where I’d write an issue in a day.

Miracleman is in an interesting position; it might be able to continue now. Miracleman 25 was finished two and a half three years ago, maybe longer and it’s been sitting around since not long after Miracleman 24. There is one whole comic nobody’s ever seen. Eclipse (publishers of Miracleman - Ed) were basically cheating people out of royalties and they were ordered to pay however many hundreds of thousands in back royalties and they couldn’t pay and they went under. And for years it was off in bankruptcy hell. Todd McFarlane just bought the entire Eclipse assets in a bankruptcy sale.”

Your last book was Angels and Visitations, which turned into the CD, Warning Contains Language. How did that happen?.

“Really it was what I did in my summer holiday! The way that it came about, I was getting pissed off at the fact that whenever I did readings at conventions, I discovered there was a thriving trade in Neil Gaiman bootlegs and I thought ‘hang on, if this stuff is going to be out there at least let it be good’. I never quite expected it to turn into this smash-hit CD thing; it began as a version of some Angels And Visitations stuff and then it just grew and got completely out of control and turned into a double CD.

Similarly, Angels and Visitations has gone on to be probably the small press success of the decade, we’ve done 25,000 copies of a $20 hardback which is an awful lot. It will be coming out of print very soon; we’re going to do the fourth printing and then we’re going to retire it. As part of the book deal I’ve done with Avon books in America, they’re going to be publishing two novels and a short story collection. The first of the novels will be Neverwhere and the second of the novels will be another thing, actually, about London, seen from a very different perspective and there’s the short story collection so I thought I think we’re done with Angels and Visitations, but I have an enormously soft spot for it.”

You’ve never perpetrated a funny cat book, but you did succumb to humorous fantasy in Good Omens. How did you come to work with Terry Pratchett on that?

“I wrote the first 20,000 words of this thing as a book I called William the Anti-Christ. I showed it to a few people, Terry Pratchett was one of them and then put it in a drawer and forgot about it. After I’d finished Don’t Panic; The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Compendium, I thought I can write in this style and by the time I got to the end of it I thought this is really easy, this is a doddle so I did a chapter of it, liked it, thought it’s quite good and then thought ‘I really don’t want to be pigeon-holed as a writer of funny horror’. Of the careers waiting for me in this world, a writer of funny horror is one I really do not want and I put it in a box, in a drawer and forgot about it.

And a couple of years later Terry rang and said ‘you know that book you started, d’you know what happens next?’ And I said ‘not really’ and he said ‘well I do. Do you want to sell me the idea and the first chapter or do you want to write it together?’ And I said, ‘let’s write it together’.”

So how did you collaborate? I’ve head you describe it as ‘alternate words.’

“We spoke all day on the telephone and then at nights I’d write stuff and mornings, Terry’s time, he’d write stuff. He had a slight advantage over me in so far as he was writing it between projects while I was writing it while also writing Books Of Magic and Sandman which meant that at two o’clock in the morning no matter where I was at on whatever I was working on I’d stop and write Good Omens until I fell asleep.

At the time Terry made lots of jokes about how once it was over, it would be our job to imply that each of us did all the writing on our own, all the way through and the other one just numbered the pages. These days when people ask I explain that I wrote 90 percent of it and Terry wrote the other 90 percent. And it also got very silly because there were places were I wrote sequences that were Terry’s idea and Terry wrote sequences that were my idea and then when we got towards the end, I’d written all the four horsemen of the apocalypse until they got to the airbase so I said ‘you take over the four horsemen and I’ll take over Adam and the gang because I’d like to do a whole Adam and the gang sequence’ so Adam and the gang going to the airbase and arriving there is all me and the four horsemen all Terry, just because we wanted a go at each others characters.”

Would you work together again?

“At the time Terry was a mildly successful fantasy author and I was a young journalist who’d just started writing a comic and we both had time. These days we’re both multinational corporations; there was never any contract between us for Good Omens, it was just ‘fine, we’ll do it and split the profits fifty-fifty between us’ but these days, the manoeuvring! People in suits would have to talk for a year before me and Terry would be allowed to have lunch together. I think he still owes me a lunch for Johnny and the Dead though, I gave him the title for that.”

Is it different when you’re working with Dave McKean on graphic novels?

“Violent Cases and Mr Punch are both me things; they’re both things I wrote and then handed to Dave. Signal to Noise on the other hand, was very very collaborative. I wanted to do something about the apocalypse and Dave wanted to do something about a film director dying and I said ‘let’s combine the two’.

Dave is doing the cover of Neverwhere (the book) and he’s doing the opening title credits so it’ll be very much a kind of animated Sandman…”

Weren’t you a journalist before you starting writing comics and novels?

“I was a terrible journalist, I was really rotten. I was quite a good interviewer, but I got bored after four or five years, I’d met everybody I wanted to meet. And also I’d moved from magazine journalism to newspaper journalism and discovered that I really hated it. I do not have the killer instinct that rejoices in sending other people’s children home in tears. I quit journalism in about 1987 when I got a phone call from my editor at Today and she said ‘Neil you’re our fantasy person, do you know anything about Dungeons And Dragons?’ I said, ‘yeah, yeah’ and she said ‘great, this is your big opportunity. We want a front page and an inside spread on how Dungeons And Dragons drives people to madness, Satanism and suicide’ and I said ‘no’, and she said ‘what do you mean no?’ and I said ‘I don’t think I’m working for you any more’.”

The Encyclopaedia of SF says that your writing combines “draconian verbal economy with an ample romanticism?” What does that mean and do you agree with it?

“Isn’t that nice. I think what John Clute is saying (Neil got the author spot on, but then he did co-write the entry on the graphic novel for the Encyclopaedia - Ed), although I could be wrong, is that I get my money’s worth from the words that I use, I make them work fairly hard. When I’m doing OK, I think I do; I know that I’m in trouble if I have to write pretty because it means that other stuff isn’t happening and I’m covering for it. That’s the quote that goes on to talk about ‘the burden of half-uttered resonances’; which is really very pretty and I’m not entirely sure what it means, but it think it means again that when I’m working well I can get things to resonate, I can say more than is being said.”

Gaiman on Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is quietly prolific. It’s not until you sit down and think that you realise how much he’s written. “It’s scary; I realised the other day I’ve got over 20 books currently in print. So, things that I would recommend.”

Mr Punch

“Of which I am so incredibly proud. It’s a graphic novel I did with Dave McKean; it’s really, I suppose, about memory and childhood. There is a fantasy element strung through it very delicately like a vein. It’s basically about violence, and memory, and the nature of violence and memory and the nature of the way that you see things as a child. It’s also a lot about families and families and secrets. And it’s some of Dave McKean’s finest work.”

Angels and Visitations

“My short story collection and stuff; a miscellany. It’s a hardback book I did with Dreamhaven which has a bunch of short stories and journalism; it was basically a book I did to celebrate having been a professional writer for ten years.

Some I put in because it was good, some just because I had a soft spot for it. It’s my little book of stuff I like and it’s got a few short stories I’m fond of, a few poems I’m fond of and there is at least one short story that is simply in there because I was very proud of writing it when I wrote it and at the age of twenty one I would have been so thrilled that it was going to wind up in a hardback book that I sort of put it in for me back then, a little gift for my 21 year old self.”

Sandman

The best-selling comic and graphic novel collections that tell stories, mainly about Morpheus, who brings sleep but not always rest.

“The nice thing about Sandman now is that one is almost in a position where one can say well, Sandman. 1-75, it is a big thing. Preludes and Nocturnes, the Dolls House, Season of Mists, Dream Country, Brief Lives, Game of You, Fables and Reflections, Worlds End, the Kindly Ones and the final volume, the Wake. It is a great big thing. They should be read in that order, they provide many hours of interesting entertainment and have lots of odd stuff in. I’m very proud of them.”

Death the High Cost of Living.

“Also a graphic novel; it’s the story of what happened when Death was mortal for a day. I just like Death. It’s a very gentle up-beat, delicate little story.”

Signal to Noise

The graphic novel of a comic originally serialised in The Face.

“I’m currently very fond of that, I’m enjoying it a lot at the moment because I’m turning it into a play for Radio 3. I’ve been away from it for long enough that I’m actually enjoying the process of going back in and messing with it, writing little extra bits and going back and taking out descriptions of what you can hear and inserting descriptions of things you could see.”

Snow Glass Apples

Where Sleeping Beauty is actually the villain, a chilling story of obsession and necrophilia.

“A short story I did as a chapbook, which I’m very fond of. It’s a fairy tale turned inside out and upside down. It has been picked up by various years’ best anthologies. I think of all my short stories, that and one I did called Murder Mysteries (which is in the back of Angels And Visitations), are probably my favourites.”

Black Orchid

Neil’s first mainstream comic (after Redfox), drawn by Dave McKean. It’s the story of a superhero who’s really a flower.

“It was this very noir thing and we set ourselves all these rules; no third person narration, very bonketa-bonketa-bonketa-bonketa pace and fixed grids…”

Spawn

Todd McFarlane’s strange comic, guest-written by luminaries including Alan Moore, Dave Sim and, of course, Neil Gaiman. Neil wrote about the hunter, Angela.

“I wrote it in this completely bizarre way, I just drew it all out for myself and got a little tape machine and dictated what was happening in each panel and the artist went off and drew it and it came back to me and I’d write all the dialog. It was the easiest funniest, silliest thing I think I’ve ever done. And my son liked it which was the purpose of the exercise.”

Temps, The Weerde, Villains

Shared world books for Penguin.

“Temps was an idea I’d had five years before; one night in a bar, we were talking about Watchmen and stuff and ‘of course’, I said, ‘if it was in England’ I said and just started burbling about these inept super-hereoey types who would never wear costumes just working for the civil service as temps. And The Weerde was something I basically made up on the spot when Penguin said “and we’d like a horror one”.

And then Villains came about because after that they wanted a normal one. They said “could we have one that’s closer to the stuff that people buy?” And Mary Gentle was going to have to edit that one and I said ‘why don’t you just do something in which the bad guys win?’”

Gaiman on artists

Neil’s own colour-by-numbers Sandman is always popular at conventions but he has worked with a huge number of artists on Sandman and other books, with varying results. When we asked Neil about his favourite artists he was unfailing enthusiastic.

“My favourite comic artist to work with is probably Dave McKean just because I think he’s a genius and because I never know what I’m going to get but it’s always better and stranger and more than I ever asked for. I’ve been incredibly spoiled on Sandman, I’ve had a list of artists that most people would kill to work with - of living, working artists there are very few that haven’t done something - even Barry Smith did us a pinup! I would love to have worked with Bernie Wrightson circa 1974/75 (the original artist on Swamp Thing - Ed). I would have liked to have worked with Barry Smith (the artist on Elric comics - Ed). They are the only two people in the world of classic comics that I wanted to work with who I haven’t, either in Sandman or in something else. I got to work with Michael Zulli, with Bryan Talbot, with Charles Vess, Jon J Muth, Ken Williams, Chris Bachalo, Mark Buckingham. It’s an amazing list, it is a wonderful, wonderful list. Mike Dringenberg and a whole host more - Craig Russell in Sandman 50. I’ve been spoiled!

A lot of the people I’d love to have worked with are dead; I’d love to have done stuff with Windsor McKaye - he did Nemo in Slumberland, wonderful artist. There are other people that I’d love to have done comics with like Aubrey Beardsley and Francis Bacon possibly - that would have been interesting. Richard Dadd - a Victorian artist who went mad, killed his father and spent the rest of his life in Bedlam; where he did The Fairy Fellow’s Masterstroke and The Marriage of Oberon and Titania. In fact I’ve been talking with John Bolton (who’s another artist I’ve been spoiled by getting to work with, we did the first of the Books Of Magic together) about doing a Richard Dadd comic - the life of Richard Dadd, moving in and out of his paintings.”

(Published in SFX magazine)