Gaiman Gabs

There's an interview over at Aint It Cool in which Neil Gaiman discusses all of the many upcoming movies he's involved in. Interestingly, he reveals that Matthew Vaughan was originally only to produce Stardust, with Terry Gilliam directing. Gilliam turned it down at the time, apparently as he'd recently completed Brothers Grimm and needed a different tone, a completely different world to step into.

Gaiman also mentions me, of all people, though not by name:

My jaw dropped recently when I discovered that a version of the script (for Death) that I had done for budgeting purposes… somebody had gotten a hold of it and was reviewing it online and it was never actually meant to be… because it was originally set in New York and we were looking at it like “How would it work if we moved it to London?” and we needed to budget it for London, so I did an incredibly quick (draft)… you know the kind of draft where you actually fail to notice Crater Park becomes Central Park and goes back a few times.

That kind of thing, but it was really a “OK, let’s just spit on its face and move it to London…” and then someone was reviewing that… it was like “No…” It was to see what kind of numbers we came up with. But I’m really very hopeful. What’s nice, I think, with Death is it sort of seems to be… well everything is moving in the right direction for it and that leaves me happier.

Nows, as I said in the review, the localisation changes were quite superficial, and the actual meat and bones of the script wouldn't have been changed at all, so I know that the pages I read were quite indicative of the film - or at least as currently planned. There could well be another draft, but that would be quite separate of any localisation issues.

I'm also quite sure that the shoot is still planned for London, later this year.

Read the full interview. It really is packed with interesting stuff.