Neil Gaiman

Illustration: Rob Kelly

Mention Neil Gaiman to any Comic-Con maven and they’ll light up with geeky reverence. Drop his name at the local deli and you’ll get nothing but blank stares. The best-selling sci-fi/fantasy author has been enthralling readers for two decades with such works as the 11-volume graphic-novel epic Sandman (written between 1987 and 1996), the 1996 BBC series Neverwhere and the award-winning 2001 book American Gods. But his cult following has never translated into widespread acclaim.

This year will change all that: Stardust, the film adaptation of his fairy tale about a star who falls to earth, hits theaters next week. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro and directed by Matthew Vaughn (producer of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and director of Layer Cake), the movie will be followed this November by Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf, which Gaiman cowrote, and Henry Selick’s adaptation of Gaiman’s surreal novella Coraline is due out in 2008. The 46-year-old British storyteller found time recently at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to chat about his new Hollywood fan base.

People now wait hours to get a Harry Potter book, but you’ve always been into fantasy. Why does it appeal to you?

Mythologies are the stories we tell each other: the stories that allow us to make sense of the world. People flew planes into the World Trade Center essentially because their imaginary friend told them to. The world is not inherently designed to make sense. We impose sense upon it.

What inspired Stardust?

I had this idea of writing a pre-Tolkien novel. Before there was a fantasy shelf in a bookshop, an author would simply write a fantasy. Something with magic wasn’t seen as an oddity or a marketing decision. The Lord of the Rings changed everything. It is so big that it shadows everything, and you wind up with things like Eragon.

Stardust isn’t earnest like Lord of the Rings or cheeky like Shrek.

The thing that makes this movie hardest to sell and problematic for the studio, bless them, is the fact that it’s not like anything else. People read the original script and said, “I love it—but is it for adults or kids? Is it a parody?” No, no, it’s completely straight. And that’s what makes it work. Michelle Pfeiffer is not a funny witch with an ironic comment and an Oprah gag; she’s absolutely fucking terrifying. If she weren’t, it wouldn’t work.

Matthew Vaughn is known for his ultraviolent films—how did this wind up being a love story?

The biggest thing I did as producer was putting the screenwriter Jane Goldman together with Matthew. He needed a yin to his yang. Matthew really had a vision for the action stuff and the tone, and by his own admission didn’t have a clue about the love story. Left alone, it would’ve been Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Fairies. That we wound up making a romance came as much as a surprise to him as anyone else.

Why are fantasy films so popular these days?

It’s similar to the reason for the mainstream acceptance of graphic novels. If you go back 20 years, a generation of young people in high schools and colleges were saying this is cool—and their professors told them that it wasn’t. Young journalists—of whom I was one in 1985—trying to sell it to their editors were told, “Fuck off, we just wrote about Dennis the Menace; why would we write about Art Spiegelman and Frank Miller?” Those journalists are now 40 and editing newspapers and magazines.

Sounds like you’ve never had to sell out to get recognition.

Well, my first big meetings in Hollywood were in 1996. The execs had no idea who I was. The young guy who was the assistant’s assistant, the one who brought me my water—he knew who I was. And he’s now earning $7 million a year, has his own private island and is running the studios. It’s nice to have the mainstream come to you and not change what you’re doing.

As a writer you have total control. Do you have to give that up to make a movie?A film is a battle, and a film script—that’s the battle plan. At the end of the day, I’m not an auteurist, because movies are such a team effort and you need all the allies you can get.

I like doing collaborative things because writing is lonely. And then again, it’s nice to go, Fuck all of you! I’m going into my room and I’m not coming out until I’ve created art.

Stardust opens Aug 10.