| Stardust the Movie (2008)
From Sci-Fi.Com ... here is what Neil Gaiman had to say about Stardust the movie.
Stardust Made Uneasy Film Transition
Neil Gaiman, who produced the upcoming big-screen version of his fairy-tale-and-adventure novel Stardust, told SCI FI Wire that the translation from book to movie was anything but easy.
In the film, a mere mortal (Charlie Cox) and a fallen star (Claire Danes) meet and hate each other, at least until they fall in love. And their path to happiness is further complicated by the star's enemies, among them a powerful witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) and several ruthless princes (including Rupert Everett, Adam Buxton and Jason Flemyng).
"The toughest nut to crack for something like Stardust, for example, in changing it into a film… there are a few things," Gaiman said in an interview. "There were the problems that we knew we had going in, because they were the problems that I had in 1998, 1999, when Miramax had the option on it briefly, and I got to do a treatment, and suddenly I came face to face with these things for the first time. The biggest one was if you are completely faithful to the pacing of the book, the hero won't be born for the first 15 or 20 minutes, and he's not going to meet the heroine until almost three-quarters of the way through the movie. That's a problem."
Also, Gaiman said, there are different pleasures to be had from reading a story versus experiencing it in a movie theater. He explained: "Something I did, that I took enormous joy in doing, and that I think is very pleasurable for readers or, if one can say this without sounding patronizing, the right kind of reader, is the way that when we get to the last few chapters the reader has a bird's eye view of the action and knows more about what's going on than any of the characters down at ground level, and there comes a point toward the end of the book where characters are missing each other, things that a character has done earlier wind up dooming them later, and they go past each other, sometimes without any knowledge of quite what's happened. And we get to the final chapter, and we know just how close our hero and heroine came to not surviving the book, but they don't, which is kind of fun."
Gaiman worked with Matthew Vaughn, the film's director and co-screenwriter, and with co-screenwriter Jane Goldman and discussed what to drop, what to move and what to reimagine in order to make Stardust work as a movie.
"If you're sitting there in the audience, having sat through 85 minutes, and now everybody is missing each other, and the witch [Pfeiffer] is too old, and she's doomed herself by these actions back there, and Sextmus [Buxton] winds up trying to kill her and getting killed by her, but never knows who she is and what she's done, it would not be very satisfying in a film," Gaiman says. "So there's this point where you go, 'We need all of them in a room.'"
Gaiman added: "The biggest challenge in the whole thing [was] trying to figure out ways to make something work as a film. Sometimes it's doable, and sometimes I have no idea how you do it." Stardust opens Aug. 10. —Ian Spelling |