Inside Coraline

Over the weekend, director Henry Selick’s stop-motion masterpiece Coraline single-handedly pushed the Portland film world a step closer to national recognition.

Filmed at Portland’s Laika Studios, Coraline tells the delightfully creepy story of a girl probing the most dangerous edges of her imagination. Based on a novella by Neil Gaiman (the undisputed master of such dark fairy tales) the film has been meeting with near universal praise in its impressive opening weekend.

This past week the Vanguard was able to talk with Selick and Gaiman about Coraline, making a film in the Northwest and the lives of “nightmarish insectiles.”

NEIL GAIMAN

Vanguard: Congratulations on the Newberry Medal (recently awarded to Gaiman for The Graveyard Book).
Neil Gaiman: Thank you, isn’t it awesome?

VG: It’s very awesome.
NG: Initially it was announced on Monday, but Tuesday morning the Today Show thing happened and NPR, and by Wednesday there weren’t any copies of The Graveyard Book around.

VG: As far as Coraline is concerned, how much involvement did you have in the writing of the screenplay itself?
NG: I had a few huge bits of involvement … things like when I finished writing the book, I gave it to my agent and said get this on [director] Henry Selick’s desk.

VG: Did you know beforehand that you wanted this to be a film?
NG: Well, no. When you’re writing a book, you don’t think about films, ’cause if you do it could all go horribly wrong … but when it was done, I looked at it and thought, “this is going to be a film.”

And I’d loved Henry’s work. I’d seen a film called Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and was smart enough to have seen who directed it … Henry Selick. I’d loved his stuff, so I sent him [Coraline].

After that I had little things like “I think you should cast French and Saunders as Miss Spink and Miss Forcible.” They were always little, they were [the] tiniest things.

VG: Were there any voice casting decisions that initially disappointed you, but ended up surprising you?
NG: No, I don’t think so. Teri Hatcher was probably the nearest and that was only because Henry had been auditioning … a whole little set of Oscar-winning actresses … and when Henry called me up and said “OK, we’ve got our other mother, it’s Teri Hatcher,”

I’m sort of going “but, you had Ms. X and Ms. Y and Ms. Zed and they are huge stars and they have Oscars and this is Teri Hatcher.” And I was so wrong, ’cause I think Teri’s awesome and I think her performance is awesome and probably a finer performance than any of the Oscar-winning ladies that we could’ve gotten.

[Teri] gets to play three, maybe four different characters because she plays the mum … and then she plays this ideal version [of the mum], and then she plays the slightly scary version and then she plays that final version which is just a creature of pure hunger, like this nightmarish insectile 100,000-year-old witch-creature that just wants something to love and something to eat, and thinks they’re probably the same thing.

VG: As far as changes within the film, do you feel that the tone shifted at all by changing the setting to Ashland?
NG: Not really, if I felt that that was going to compromise what I’d done, I would’ve stopped it happening. The truth about Coraline‘s story is it’s any little girl in any little house. The Japanese edition of Coraline, they got a Japanese illustrator to illustrate it and Coraline is Japanese, and so are her parents, and so is the witch and the cat, and it works every bit as well.

HENRY SELICK

VG: Coraline is a beautiful film, it seemed that the detail involved in creating the world of Coraline was even more in-depth than either James and the Giant Peach or The Nightmare Before Christmas [Selick’s other two feature-length, stop-motion films].
HS: It’s sort of a combination of things. I mean, 3-D is the best way to see this, it captures what’s unique about this crazy puppet animation that I love to do … this stuff is real. We used [3-D] to sort of support the story and sort of draw people in so a certain amount of that detail you’re seeing is just using 3-D.

I had an incredible crew, some were veterans of Will Vinton Studios [now Laika] and some younger animators who have been working here for a while. [There] was crew from The Nightmare Before Christmas … [we had] a lot of people from England where there’s a tradition of stop-motion, Canada, Belgium, Germany, New Zealand. We got people who wanted to kick ass and really… put everything into it.

VG: So on a given day how many animators did you have working?
HS: We started off with just a few animators and at the end we peaked out at 30 animators, which is the most I’ve ever worked with. I’ve never worked with more than 17, so, at our peak, I’m interacting with 30 animators, 45 stages—everything’s in full force; lighting the sets, creating backgrounds, animating trees and adding atmosphere. It’s a wild scene.

VG: It’s obviously extremely time consuming. How long have you been working on Coraline?
HS: The real work, the making of the film … that’s a solid three and a half years, but it started out a long time ago and I actually spent, you know, maybe a year and a half writing the screenplay several times in [the] early 2000s and thinking about the film for a long time, imagining virtually every detail … so I’ve maybe lived in Coraline‘s universe for a little too long.

VG: Portland Monthly and the Willamette Week have both reported that Phil Knight is banking on Coraline to bring Laika into the feature film arena. With regards to the film’s reception, does that add a significant amount of pressure for you?
HS: Every film you work on [there] is always this conflict between art and commerce, and in the end you want to tell stories people want to see and remember. I’m absolutely certain we’ve created a film that will have a very long life … and I absolutely don’t expect to have immediate success at the level of the Pixar films.

We’re doing these films for a third of the cost of those, and I think Phil Knight’s a guy who looks at things long term. What’s important is that he and Travis took a chance on not trying to follow Pixar and Dreamworks and Bluesky, and instead went with something more independent minded.

[Laika] was the best possible home for this project, it’s the best artistic support I’ve received since The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s the same thing where almost all the energy went up on the screen and [was] not lost in the fear and politics which bogs down so many Hollywood films.