Interview With Coraline Director Henry Selick

What was the biggest challenging in making this a reality?

Selick: The biggest challenge was always going to be bringing Coraline to life. That was always the thing that I was most interested seeing if we could do. She's not outlandish and cartoonish as a character. She's the straight-man of the show. So that's what I always saw as the greatest challenge in bringing the book to the screen in animation. As far as individual scenes and moments, the mouse circus, the downstairs theater, some of things that I show you day, Spink and Forcible. Things that I didn't show you like when she goes down and has her tea leaves read and you first get introduced to them and see what their world is like. There is this incredibly critical scene when Coraline has come to this other world, and in the book it's really one main visit and all these things happen. Then she escapes only to discover that her parents are missing and were lured over there. We do it so that she travels back and forth a few times. First it's in dreams and then after a particularly bad time with her mother, her mother goes out for shopping Coraline gets the key to that door and opens it knowing that it's not a dream, that it's real and it is. She goes back for the greatest show yet, but the capper is that her mother tells her, 'You could stay here forever. There's just a little thing that you have to do.' This is right from the book. 'Oh, it's just a little thing.' It's sitting her down and we have a surprise and it's a box of buttons and a needle and thread. It takes her a moment to understand. 'What's this?' 'If you want to stay here you just have to sew those buttons on the dress.' It's sort of the price to pay if she wanted to be there and what rational person would ever agree to that. But she finds out the ghosts of the children before her, they wanted the mother had to offer. They agreed. So that was a scene that I always knew was going to be tough to pull off, getting the right balance and not making it over the top like the other kinds of monsters. They're very reasonable in the way that we've done it. It takes Coraline a while because it's a lot of shots back and forth. So that was one of the key scenes from the book that I was wanting to bring to the screen. You saw that these are puppets. They're made of metal and silicone, plastic. So can we get the audience to believe in them enough so that a moment like that, a horrific moment will have impact. It's unexpected and it's unsettling. I think it's working. That was maybe one of the most critical ones.

In regard to the 3-D are you shooting this in a way that'll still be engaging to the audience when it makes the transition over to DVD?

Selick: Well, mainly, most of the time I'm watching it in 2-D when I'm working on it. I don't go out to every set everyday, but all the animators have to see me in editorial at the start and end of all the rehearsals. So we have two edit rooms and I'm jumping back and forth and we're only looking at it in 2-D. We check shots in the 3-D. I think it's going to work great.

You're not using the 3-D as a main selling point then? It's just to compliment the film?

Selick: I would prefer, if the number of theaters exist and certainly in the states the number is going up – it's not my call – but I think it's a better experience in 3-D because we're using it as a part of the story so that the other world has this richer feel to it and we're not cranking it up over the top with stuff shooting out of the screen all the time. In the end the stories and the characters are the main things and I hope that they work well enough in 2-D. Now there's also Hi-Def DVD's, Blu-ray. There's actually really good 3-D capability down the road for home screens, including no glasses 3-D. Phillips Electronics and Lenny Lipton who's part of the company Real D which is kind of the premiere 3-D company. They work with exhibitors. It's their system's software/hardware going into the majority of theaters. So anyway it'll work in 2-D and work quite well. That's how I actually deal with the film most of the time. But I think that 3-D is just a more memorable experience and that will be coming online for home screens too. But for now the theater is going to be the best place.

Can you talk about how this project first began for you?

Selick: I wasn't really aware of Neil [Gaiman] from the start, of 'Sandman'. So you're trying to do different things, graphic novels, the first ones – when that happened with 'The Dark Knight' I was right there. 'Watchmen' too and the early years of that. Then I was in and out of it. But I first met Neil in 2000 and it was just like, 'Here's Neil Gaiman.' He had this book that wasn't published yet. It wasn't even finished. I think that he called Tim Burton and he called me and I'm the one that called back [laughs]. I worked with Tim on a number of films, but I got to read it and I took it to Bill Mechanic who had been the head of Fox and had an independent company called Pandemonium. I could see it right away as a movie. I saw it as edgy, but Neil said from the start and he's always been right about something, that kids – not little kids because it's not a little kid's film – but it always felt that the youngest one should be about nine. I don't know, but it's that kids saw it as an adventure and adults saw it as something really frightening. He's got three kids and as they were growing up he had worked on 'Coraline' for a very long time. He started it for his older daughter. She got older and then he used every daughter as his sort of inspiration. In the book you actually see that Coraline seems to act different ages at different points. It was just one of those things where we got together and I felt that it was ready to be made into a movie just like that. I took it to Bill Mechanic just like that. I saw Neil do a reading of short stories and he was like a rock star. He was great, very charismatic. Him reading his stories you get every nuance. There's a lot of humor in Neil's work, even in his darkest work. In 'Coraline' the book there's a lot of very dry, but exquisite humor and we try to hold onto that as well. But we connected. We went to Bill Mechanic and I convinced him to let me write it. It was practically written, but it was actually a lot of work to turn it into a screenplay. Bill wanted it to be live action. He was adamant that it go that way and it took a long time of going away and doing other things to coming back to it to get the screenplay to work and to sort of pull it back to where I first saw it, as animation. I always felt that this, it's a scary book for kids and if it's animation I think that it takes a little of the edge off of the worst moments, but it keeps the Grimm's Fairy Tale quality. But it was a pretty long journey from 2000 to now to almost having it finished. I feel very grateful in getting to make the movie that I wanted to. I think that Neil is very happy with it as well. I've shown him reels of the entire film and he's great at input. He always focuses on one little thing and he's almost always right. He never goes, 'Well, this isn't the book anymore.' It inhabits it and he totally understands that movies have to be their own things. It's been a really good relationship. That's a hell of a long answer. I'll be quicker and try to get through two more [laughs].

What did he think about the changes that you made?

Selick: I mean, privately I'm not sure, but he never got angry. It was always fine. Here's what really happened. The first screenplay that I wrote I was – Neil is a hell of a writer. I've always written as a director because you have to do rewrites and you can't get the writer and so you do your own dialogue. I had written on things of my own, but this is the first official screenplay that I was being paid to write. Bill Mechanic was pushing for certain things. The first screenplay that I wrote was too faithful to the book. It was exactly the book and it was one of those things where on one hand I was interacting with Neil a lot and I think he was flattered, but it didn't work. It wasn't a movie. I had to not talk to him for a year. I had to go off, tear everything apart and then try to put it back together in a way that feels like the book, has all these elements from the book, it's very true to the nature of the book and it's characters, but it's turned into the form that it is and (SP?) Whitey became one of those things. Coraline – we can read her thoughts and what she's thinking, but I don't want to have a voice over. What can I do? There was definitely a push from Bill Mechanic. 'We need a lot of kids. Where are the kids?' I focused on one that I thought worked. You'll need to see the movie and see how he plays. I think it works. Neil seems fine with it. He seemed fine from the start. He would question a few things, but it was this odd thing where I stopped talking to him for a year and then I wrote the real screenplay and I'll be honest, I was terrified for him to read it. I had everyone but Neil read it and then I was like, 'Well, fine. I have to have Neil read it.' He said, 'You know, this is much better than the first one.' He was great.

Can you talk about the musical aspects of the movie?

Selick: Early on there was going to be some more songs. I thought there was a way to do that and we worked with They Might Be Giants on several songs. In the end there are really only a few moments of music that are a part of the story. They Might Be Giants are incredible. They do a song. John Linnell sings the other father song that's written for Coraline. Coraline's father is like busy writing. He and her mom are really behind on this really important gardening catalog that they're writing. He has no time and is buried at his computer in his room just like in the book. In the other world when the other mother tells her, 'Go get your father and tell him that supper is ready –' she goes to what appears to be the same study door and opens it. There's father in the same position but instead of a computer he's sitting at a piano tapping notes to Coraline's surprise. She says, 'My father can't play piano.' He says, 'There's no need to. This piano plays me.' Sort of the hands come out, gloves that slip over his and John Linnell wrote this great song just about Coraline. It's sort of out of control and it's just perfect. So we have that. As far as the ladies in the downstairs theater they sing this salty song. I wrote that. I tried to get They Might Be Giants to rewrite it and they said, 'No. It's fine. It's perfectly fine.' I still think that they would've done a better job, but it's my song. The score is by Bruno Coulais. He's a French composer. He did 'Winged Migration', 'Microcosmos' and an incredible number of European films and I think one Danish animated film. When you're making a movie you always put up temp music especially when it's a bunch of storyboards or a rough cut, you want the music to sound big. It really helps you tell what's working and helps an audience if you're showing it to execs or anyone. Everything that we tried was either too scary and dark from a straight horror film and kid's summer animation was too light and fluffy and Bruno Coulais just happened to be one of the billion of CD's that we popped in to try and find something that was sort of more honest of a portrayal of the magic of childhood that also had the terror of childhood. It just was this fit. We contacted him and he was available. He's written about half of the music so far to the movie. He does it on a synthesizer and sends us things. Ninety percent of what he's sent is like perfect from day one. It's a very, very fine line because the tone of this movie is always on a razor's edge. We want it to be fun and right in moments, but also have life and death consequences at others.

So the music we heard wasn't temp music?

Selick: The music with Lovinski at the top of the stairs was his music. The circus mice was not. That's actually a friend of mine who wrote something so that we could animate to it. The other one was not, just that first piece.

Will there be any visual FX shots in the film?

Selick: From repair work, removals and that scene in the face where you're changing eyebrows separately from mouths – there's a fair amount of visual FX. We're always trying to base it though, like when all the flowers grow in the Fantastic Garden, a number of those will really be there. Some of them will be manipulated by the animators. Others are shot off screen, manipulated by an animator and then visual FX will populate a whole hillside with them because it's just the better way to go. We had someone named Brian Van't Hul who's an Academy Award winner and someone that I worked with back on 'Nightmare Before Christmas'. He was at WETA. He's been working for years there with Peter Jackson. He wanted to work on something a little more simple. He thought it would be simpler, more handmade, a mix of practical FX and CGI and digital. I wanted to do it in-house. I wanted to shoot a lot of this stuff [in-house]. There are a lot of visual FX, but we're trying to not make it CG generated, but CG is the way to glue it together. There are a few really good tricks. We have cotton fog and his guys touch it and moves and it makes a huge difference.

Are there ideas for a toy line because the characters are just so odd?

Selick: We've met with Hot Topic. There's that chain store for Goth kids, outsider kids, Hot Topic [laughs] and so, yeah, there's interest. Everything that you see onscreen, every character design – I've got kids now that are growing up, they're nine and sixteen, but in the years that I've worked on this I've run things by them, their friends, my niece. I just want to see what kids think of this. They would want to get their hands on some of this stuff and actually someone from Puppet Fat asked if I was going right into another film and what I was going into next and I said, 'Well, it's cranking out puppets and selling them.' We have the world's experts right here.

How has this experience compared to your other full length features?

Selick: In many ways it's most like 'Nightmare'. 'Nightmare' was a situation where Tim had dreamed up a brilliant story, a concept, the main characters and then they wouldn't let him make it at Disney. I was friends with him then at Disney and I saw the first presentations and it took years until he had the power to come back. It was still owned by Disney, but it was a situation where there was really zero studio interference. It was a low budget film. We would get notes. Jeffrey Katzenberg was still at Disney then and I'd go to Tim and say, 'Well, what do I do?' He said, 'If something works do it. Otherwise it doesn't matter.' He was the godfather of the project and he saw everything as we worked on it. We'd send it to him, but he was making two other films and so he wasn't questioning everything. He just loved it. It was like getting a gift from us every week. There was only one shot that we ever had to re-shoot for him. It wasn't dark enough. So it was about ninety nine percent of all the energy, all of the artist's energy went into the movie. This film was a little harder to get going, but once we got going it's been the same sort of artistic support. We have great distributors who are very supportive. They recognize it as an edgy family film, not just like anything else. So it's most like 'Nightmare' for artistic support and I think for the crews investment. I know a lot of people, and we are pretty tired at this point and talking about how hard it is, but the fact is that everyday you get to see a small miracle or ten and every week you see a larger miracle. I think we're all pretty impressed with each other and inspired by each other. It's like an artistic community that you don't often find after you've gotten out of Cal Arts or some other art school. So it's been an amazing and positive experience.