John Mosby goes through a looking-glass darkly to look at the process that brought Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Mirrormask to the screen and talks to McKean about the practical magic of CGI.
Mirrormask, out in UK cinemas this month and already out on DVD in the States is the sort of project that combines the old with the new. Older audiences will spot some similarities in premise to Henson’s earlier work, Labyrinth, but the visual style here is much more complex, surreal and twisted. Dave McKean’s vivid and dark imagery that most comic fans will recognise from his comic-partnership with Neil Gaiman gets expanded to fill the whole screen.
“It started with a phone-call from Lisa Henson, who is Jim Henson’s daughter. She had this little window of opportunity from Columbia TriStar (as they were then) in America. They were in the middle of Muppet deals and they fancied doing another fantasy film. Someone in the book-keeping department had noticed that the two films that Jim made - Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal - were very expensive and not very successful, but over the (subsequent) years have become enormously successful. They’ve continued to find new audiences and people love them still. So someone said ‘We should do another one… but for a tenth of the budget of The Dark Crystal twenty years ago!” Dave explains.
The film deals with Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) the daughter of two circus-performers. When her mother (Gina McKee) is taken ill, the threat of closure hands over their heads as her father (the ever more versatile Rob Brydon) struggles to keep everything together. Helena starts to withdraw into her own world and sketches, but one night she finds herself drawn far too far into that world and her adventure ‘through the looking glass’ quickly becomes a Dali-esque nightmare with familiar faces but new situations. Think Labyrinth meets Lost meets that really strange dream you had after a dodgy pizza while reading Sandman. Was the classic running-away-to-join-the-circus a factor of his own childhood?
“It wasn’t my dream. But we just went to see Circe du Soleil at the Albert Hall, so it’s my son’s current dream to run away and join the circus. I don’t know if it’s a dying art, it seems to be having something of a resurgence at the moment. All the circus performers that we got involved in the film were happy for the work, but already had work around. It was my dream to run away and make films…” he shrugs.
Most movies take a good couple of months, at best, to shoot with extensive work later. In the case of Mirrormask, the post-production work was far and away the bigger challenge. A good three quarters of the film is set in a fantasy world and that provided some unique challenges for the long-ish schedule.
“Longish is an understatement. The shoot was about thirty days - six weeks. A week on location in London doing the circus and the hospital and that kind of stuff. A week in Brighton doing that amazing block of flats that my producer found… this beautiful decaying cancerous building (it’s now totally done up, the residents got together, so it’s the last time it will ever be seen that way) which was an astounding place to walk around. Then four weeks in a green-screen studio. We had budgeted, very frugally, for eight months of animation post production… which turned into seventeen months. We still arrived a squeak under budget, which was a bit of a magic trick. It was nightmarish. It just went on and on. There were many, many phone calls home to my wife saying ‘This is impossible and we should just admit that to ourselves now, pack up our few remaining marbles and go home!’. But it finally staggered over the finishing line.”
Budgets are everything, but does a film like this benefit from a relatively small budget, because the creators have to figure things out more creatively, or would they have welcomed more cash?
“Interesting question… when we started (the budget) was $4 million / £2.6 million. In the months where the film was being written and going through the works at Columbia, we lost a chunk of money. The dollar plummeted. We’d begged them to buy pounds ‘NOW!’, but they didn’t. So we lost a few hundred grand on that. But it was great knowing that budget. It was great because you knew where you could put the money and things to avoid. There are two big things that are expensive. One is photo-realism. If you want something to be absolutely, believably realistic - lit so all the bounce light is correct, the model is such a level of complexity that it fools the eye into believing it’s real (which is a staple of big Hollywood movies) then it’s just time consuming. It’s all possible and it’s relatively to do, but it’s just time consuming. That’s where the money goes. To be honest, I wasn’t so interested in that. I was interested in something that looks like a drawing, an illustration… it’s not trying to be real. It’s in her imagination, made from the drawings on the wall. So once you make that choice, after that, it’s fine. If you were trying to do a CGI wolf, we all know what a dog looks like and how it moves. It only needs a whisker out of motion and you go ‘Oh, that’s not right!’ It’s hotwired in our minds how things work. If we’re not trying to do that, if we’re just trying to make something that has its own qualities and fell then that issue is never a problem…” he explains.
How did the actors cope with such a CGI-heavy atmosphere? Dave says that some did better than others, but that they all rose to the challenge of acting to things that wouldn‘t actually be created for many months to come.
“They weren’t so much problems. But it’s difficult if you are just in a big room and there’s someone jumping up and down in front of you with a little scrappy drawing, trying to say ‘Behind you is a palace and a staircase, over there is a chicken, over there is a red troll. At one point Rob Brydon said ‘I just can’t do this!’ and had a little panic. But they were fine in the end. I’d say that Gina McKee was the most experienced of them all and she had an ‘interesting’ time I think. I talked to her a little about it when we were done. There was some friction between us on what we were trying to do. She’s never done a film like this before… never done a blue-screen or FX film before. She’s done these wonderful dramas. I saw in her in Wonderland, the Michael Winterbottom film and she’s great. She said, “Look I know film inside out and backwards, I’ve been doing films a long time and in the first hour I can see what the rhythm of it all will be, who the people are I should be talking to, what is being shown, what lenses…” she knew it all… but she never quite got the gist of this one. Every day would go by and I’d be saying ‘I’m afraid you’re going to be a sixty-foot floating head, so I need you to stay still.” ‘Okkkay… do you want me to act at all?’ ‘I think your mouth is going to survive the editing process but I’m not sure about the rest of you’. I think she found it a bit of a challenge, but I think she kinda enjoyed it. I’m really not sure she’s really like to jump onboard a Star Wars movie or something like that…
You would think that his long collaboration with Gaiman, who wrote the script for Mirrormask, would benefit the project but though it helped in certain areas, the two men began to realise that they had different approaches to their work. Where the boundaries of each other’s realms were clearly defined when they worked ‘together’ on comics; here that process meant physically combining their talents too and McKean admits there were some initial, but solvable problems.
“There’s tons of things that Neil was planning - even some stuff that looked simple - that I knew would really cause us problems. So I didn’t necessarily want to write it, I just wanted to be in the room… to say: ’you’ve got two armies coming together coming together here, we can’t have that… we CAN do a cat!’ (laughs). As it turned out, we both pitched in ideas and we had a table full of ideas and sounds and images. We put it together between us. But THAT’s where the conflict was because we’d never done that before. Actually, we’re completely incompatible with each other…”
As for the future, Dave has enjoyed this first real sense of film-making, but will consider his options carefully as to where the next step takes him.
“I’d just like to make a good film, really. This one, to be honest, feels like film school. I pretty much had to learn from scratch and made every mistake in the book. I’m sure that next time I’ll make lots of new mistakes, but not repeat the old ones!” he smiles. “I’d like to make a film that really feels like mine. This one has a lot in it that I enjoyed a great deal… especially wandering around the city. There’s a lot about this film that doesn’t feel so much like my turf, so I’d like to do a film that really feels like mine. I’ve got to know a couple of film directors now and it feels like a life-long thing. You never quite get to make your perfect film. With illustrations its different… you could also say that it’s impossible to get perfection in a comic book, but I’m in complete control and any mistakes are utterly mind and nothing to do with anyone else. I love doing that and it’s wonderful to be able to do that… and a privilege to spend my life doing that.”
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John Mosby After coming runner-up in the Jackanory Writing Competition, John Mosby eventually became a freelance entertainment journalist and has spent the last fifteen years or more discovering his and others’ delusions of adequacy. He’s written three books including two official tie-ins: X-Men: The Essential Guide and The Making of Barb Wire and has eMCeed conventions in Los Angeles and Sydney. In March 2006, will help host a major Highlander event at the Royal Armouries in Leeds (www.highlanderworldwide.com). He edits Impact magazine - available in most Borders, W H Smith, Barnes & Noble etc. and Verbatim (e-mail him at a.j.mosby@btinternet.com for ordering details)