Q IS FOR QUESTIONS FOR NEIL GAIMAN

 
Neil with Angel

   In Subic, I was able to have an exclusive interview with Neil Gaiman on books, new media, and The Endless. Below is what transpired:
What is the new world order for creatives?
The new order is exactly same as the old order. I keep doing things that interests me. So I move into new media. Everything changes, everything reconfigures.
How have you changed with media?
  The biggest problem before was distribution. You were dependent on someone else, cost of distribution, You needed to find people. Now, the cost of movies are inexpensive. We live in YouTube world. I put a goofy video about me training a bat. Next thing I know, 50,000 people have seen it.
   Our world right now, whether it be in advertising or any other medium. everybody has instant access to distribution. It is a great democracy. I wish I had the technology now when I was kid. It would have sped up the process.
What excites you about moving between media (comic to books to film)?
I am worried that journalist like to make my  career linear. They think it’s is like an evolutionary progress from being journalist to a comic book writer, etc. It isn’t really like that and I don’t like being boxed in.
Do you think of the possibility of extending a script of a book to film script?
I do, then I stop myself.  It is because you start thinking movie plots and movie logic. There are movie people asking for movie rights to my Graveyard book and I tell them “Go away”. I will think of a movie ending when I finish the book.
Do you love Roald Dahl (author of Charlie and the Chocolate factory)? Have you read his story about a machine that writes books? What do you think of it?
    I love Roald Dahl. It was odd I discovered his nasty adult short stories that were so sharp and so nasty. Regarding the story machine, I haven’t seen one. Yet it would be great so I could retire and rest on a hammock.
Why do people love hearing myths again and again?
    I think people love familiar stories. As a kid, you would ask your mom to read your story again and again. Books are places. Reading is the joy of going to that place. Sometimes the joy is seeing something before it went that way. In Sandman: Endless Night, you see the Endless appear in a period long, long before time. Kinda fun to see when they were that way, when death was much colder, dream was much more innocent.
Would the Endless be different 11 years after the series ended?
    The joy of creating those characters is that they would hold up in any situation. They are pretty much the same. In a world where people still desire things, In a world where people still die, they are pretty much unchangeable.