Eavesdropping At The Dream Factory

Mirrors & Muppets

The double act has also spent the past two years embarking on a new adventure in a completely different genre. Although McKean has produced several award-winning short films and Gaiman has done a variety of film work, including several film scripts as well as writing and directing "A Short Film About John Bolton," neither has taken on a project like "Mirror Mask," a feature film they are producing for the Jim Henson Company.

The project began as "Curse of the Goblin King," a placeholder title sold by Henson to Columbia Tri-Star, who wanted something in the same vein as "Labyrinth" and "The Dark Crystal." Gaiman and McKean signed on at the late Jim Henson's home, "a peculiar place filled with rotting Muppets," as Gaiman described it. He laughingly explained that whenever the script called for some small creature, he simply inserted the perfunctory "goblins," a move that caused McKean no end of dismay.

"Our film had no curses or goblins, or kings, for that matter," McKean sighed. "It was never going to work, really. I was convinced that we shouldn't have any mention of goblins whatsoever because any studio executive who read the script was going to go, 'Ooh, look, goblins. Some more of those would be great.' We flipped on it and I won but I still felt so guilty that I spent two more hours trying to convince Neil that I was right."

Gaiman kindly offered up some juicy tidbits about the film, which is highly anticipated by the pair's legions of fans.

"The plot concerns a circus girl who actually doesn't want to be part of the circus," Gaiman began. "She has an argument with her mum during which her mum says that lots of people want to run away and join the circus and she says, 'Well, I want to run away and join real life.' Rather earlier than she expects, she gets her wish when her mum gets sick. It's all about this strange dream that she has on the night of her mum's operation when she is in a peculiar world that is ruled by a dark queen and a white queen. The dark queen is trying to destroy the world and the white queen is asleep and the only thing that can wake her up is this mysterious Mirror Mask." Gaiman also described another character in his droll, black humor.

"There is a lady named Mrs. Bagwell, who is a Sphinx lady in the same way that some old ladies are cat ladies. Her home is filled with tiny little winged sphinxes with human faces and incredibly sharp teeth. Although they all look exactly the same, she calls them things like Snowy and Ginger and Spike. At one point, she mentions that her husband, the late Mr. Bagwell, didn't like them but they loved him and in fact wouldn't eat for a week after he mysteriously disappeared," Gaiman said.

The film is co-written by Gaiman and McKean, so that the visionary McKean could conceive of what was both affordable and inventive as well. With a budget of just roughly $4 million, McKean is pushing the edge of animation with a team of technicians at Hourglass Studios near London.

"We had these arguments when we were writing it that would have sounded incomprehensible to anyone else," Gaiman remembered. "One of the reasons that I didn't go off and write it and give a script to Dave was that he knew what he could do for the tuppence they paid and he knew what would cost him money. He would say, 'Look, you can't write a scene that is set in a school because we need a schoolroom and we need kids to fill it and we need all this stuff. On the other hand, if you want to do a scene where the entire city folds up like a piece of paper, crushes, and then reforms into a flower, I can do that.' It's inventive and it's beautiful and it does cool things that no one has ever done before because we couldn't afford to do the cool things that everybody has already done. It's cooler than I imagined which is always the case where Dave is concerned."