TIME magazine co-interviews Joss Whedon & Neil Gaiman

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Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman may well be the two most
interesting people creating popular culture right now.
Whedon is the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Angel, and he wrote and directed the science fiction film
Serenity, which opens Sept. 30th. Gaiman created the
instant-classic comic book Sandman, and he's the author of
the new novel Anansi Boys, out this month. He has a new
movie, Mirrormask, which also opens Sept. 30. They chatted
on the phone together—chaperoned by TIME's Lev
Grossman—about their work, their fans, their Klingon
bodyguards and, of course, Timecop.



TIME: Joss, this is Lev from Time magazine. You're also in
the virtual presence of Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman: I'm not virtual. I'm here.

TIME: Sorry. You're virtual, Joss. Neil's real.

Joss Wedon: Okay. I wondered.

TIME: I'm glad we settled that.

JW: Nice to meet you.

NG: You, too. Lev was just asking whether we'd met, and I
was explaining that once you get to a certain sort of
level, there are 80,000 people who want to meet you, and
you're being moved from place to place by people who want
to make sure who we meet.

JW: Yes. I've been sixteen steps behind Kevin Smith for
four years. I've never seen him.

NG: Exactly.

TIME: I think there's actually a law that you guys can't be
in the same room at the same time. It's like the President
and the Vice President, or something.

JW: Like the two Ron Silvers in Timecop.

TIME: That's exactly the simile I was looking for. So you
guys both have movies coming out on September 30th.

NG: It will be National Geek Day.

TIME: Serenity has a bit of an unconventional story behind
it. Joss, do you want to run it down for us real quick?

JW: Real quick, I did the show Firefly, which had a
gloriously short career. I just loved the show and the
people and the world too much to walk away when they
cancelled it, so I hunted about for someone to agree with
me and then, rather shockingly, found Universal Studios
agreed with me to the tune of a great deal more money than
I had ever expected to have to work with. What everybody
said was dead in the water suddenly became—maybe not for
them, but for me—a rather major motion picture.

TIME: Are you nervous? You've got 11 days before it opens.

JW: Something like that. I don't count. I'm not aware of
the opening day. I'm not going to be hiding in the bathtub.


TIME: What do you do?

JW: I stockpile canned goods and hide in the basement.

NG: Lucky bastard. I'm going to be signing books out in
public.

JW: That gives you great legitimacy. You can say, 'well, I
write books. I'm above all this.'

TIME: You could write a book, Joss.

JW: Yes, but not in the next eleven days. I could write a
blog.

TIME: Neil, you're a big blogger these days, right?

NG: I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I
started blogging, it was dinosaur blog. It was me and a
handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like,
'the tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.'

These days there are 1.2 million people reading it. It's
very, very weird. We have this enormous readership, as a
result of which now I feel absolutely far too terrified and
guilty to stop. I'd love to stop my blog at this point, but
there's this idea that there will be 1.2 million people's
worth of pissed-off-ness that I hadn't written anything
today.

JW: That's the problem with doing anything. Everybody
expects you to keep doing it, no matter what.

NG: For me, it's always that Mary Poppins thing. I'll do it
until the wind changes. The joy of doing Sandman was doing
a comic and telling people, no, it has an end, at a time
when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and
stop doing a comic that people were still buying just
because you'd finished. Probably of all the things I did in
Sandman, that was the most unusual and the oddest. That I
stopped while we were outselling everybody, because it was
done. What everybody wants is more of what they had last
time that they liked.

JW: Every other question I get is about the Buffy-verse.

NG: Except the trouble is, as a creator...I saw a lovely
analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like
otters. And otters are really hard to train. Dolphins are
easy to train. They do a trick, you give them a fish, they
do the trick again, you give them a fish. They will keep
doing that trick until the end of time. Otters, if they do
a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they'll do
a better trick or a different trick because they'd already
done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us
get pretty bored doing the same trick. We've done it, so
let's do something different.

TIME: Joss, you're someone who insisted on doing the same
thing again. Was that a tough decision? I'm sure you had a
zillion offers on the table once Buffy ended.

JW: Well, it wasn't a question of doing the same thing
again as finally finishing the thing that I'd started.
There are definitely times when you go through every
permutation of an idea and then you go, well, that's over.
And that was lovely, thank you. I'll have my fish. With
Serenity, I felt like we had just gotten started. The story
hadn't been told yet. That's what put the fire in me. When
I actually had the whole thing filmed and cast and ready to
go, and then it wasn't finished, it made me a little bit
insane.

TIME: Let's talk about your respective fan bases. A lot of
them self-identify as kind of on the geeky side.

NG: I think the fan base is literate. You need to be
reasonably bright to get the jokes and to really follow
what's going on. That, by definition, is going to exclude a
lot of people who will then get rather irritated at us for
being pretentious and silly and putting in things they
didn't quite get. But it's also going to mean that some of
the people who do get the stuff will probably be fairly
bright.

JW: Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science
fiction world means really understanding what you're seeing
and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people
don't bother to read. So yes, I think it's kind of the same
thing.

But I also think there's a bit of misconception with that.
Everybody who labels themselves a nerd isn't some giant
person locked in a cubbyhole who's never seen the opposite
sex. Especially with the way the Internet is now, I think
that definition is getting a little more diffuse.

NG: I know that our fan bases overlap enough to be able to
say fairly confidently that the joy of signing for me, and
the joy of signing for Joss, is you can't tell who's your
fan any more. When I started doing Sandman, I could look at
a line of people lined up to get my autograph, and I knew
who was my fan and who was somebody's mum there to get a
signature. It doesn't work that way anymore. People say,
well, there's the Goths or whatever, and you always do get
a few beautiful Goths and people always remember them, but
they may be one of a hundred in a line. Mostly they're
people. They're us. That's what they look like.

JW: They're a lot more attractive than I am, actually,
which kind of disturbs and upsets me.

TIME: When I was growing up, only the geeky and socially
marginal people were into stuff like Spiderman and JRR
Tolkien. But in the last five years they've become the
biggest entertainment phenomena around. How did it get so
nerds are suddenly driving popular culture?

JW: I do think you can definitely see indications that
Hollywood has woken up to the market, to the idea of this
community as a way to put out their product. But fantasy
movies have always been huge. It's not like Star Wars
—which came out when I was eleven—was a tiny art house
flick. So I'm always sort of curious at the marginalization
of the people who adore them.

NG: I think also, the thing that's odd is that we're now
living in a second-stage media world anyway. One of the
reasons that both Joss and I can do some of the stuff that
we've done over the years is because you're working in a
medium in which enough stuff has simply entered popular
culture that it becomes part of the vocabulary that we can
deal with. The materials of fantasy, of all different kinds
of fantasy, the materials of SF, the materials of
horror...it's pop culture. It's tattooed on the insides of
our retinas. As a result, it's something that's very easy
just to use as metaphor. You don't have to explain to
anybody what a vampire is. You don't have to explain the
rules. Everybody knows that. They know that by the time
they're five.

JW: We're getting to a point where you don't have to excuse
them, either. Where popular culture as a concept is itself
popular, so it isn't as marginal if you say, oh, this has a
fantastical element to it. People are okay with that. Part
of that is the post-modern sort of we're-in-the-know,
everything-is-referencing-everything. Which can actually be
annoying after a while. But part of it is also an
understanding that what's going on in society that is
popular is maybe worth looking into.

NG: We're also in a world right now in which mainstream
fiction borrows from fantasy. A world in which Michael
Chabon wins a Pulitzer with a book with a load of comics
characters in it. I no longer know where the demarcation
lines are. My stuff gets published in some countries as
fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where
they think it will do best in the bookshops.

TIME: One of the best novels I read this year was Never Let
Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. They don't come much more
highbrow than Ishiguro, but this was set in an alternate
universe where humans are being cloned and having their
organs harvested. Not only can Ishiguro do that, he can do
that and hardly anyone even remarks on it.

JW: It's Remains of the Clone! It's absolutely just his
sensibility, with that one little twist that you have to
call it science fiction or fantasy to an extent. Nobody
would not consider it a serious classical novel.

TIME: I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these
things. Now everybody's into Tolkien. And I feel a little
like, hey, I've been into that stuff my whole life. And in
fact, you used to beat me up for it.

JW: I miss a little of that element, the danger of, oh, I'm
holding this science fiction magazine that's got this great
cover. There a little bit of something just on the edge
that I'm doing this. That's pretty much gone. Although when
I walk into a restaurant with a stack of comic books, I
still do get stared at a little bit.

NG: I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact
that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even
these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you
do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven's
sake. They're creepy and I was down in the gutter and you
despised me. 'No, no, we love you! We want to give you
awards! You write graphic novels!' We like it here in the
gutter!

JW: We've been co-opted by the man.

NG: We're in this weird world. Anansi Boys is coming out,
and it's a funny fantasy novel, and it's being published as
a mainstream thing. It should have been 10,000 copies just
to people who love them, who would have had to go to a
science fiction specialty shop with a cat in it just to
find it.

JW: But ultimately I prefer this, just because . . . well,
it's not as though I'm only trying to reach one tiny
segment of people when I write. It's not like I want to
have the clubhouse with the No Girls sign. I appreciate the
people who are stepping into genre a little bit because
they realize there's more there. For me, ultimately, even
though I miss my twenty minutes of actually being cool and
marginalized, I think it's more gratifying ultimately to be
in this world.

TIME: Have either of you guys considered going straight,
doing a non-genre project?

NG: My mind tends to work in this way. Every now and then
I'll do little things, a short story or something, that
doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like
the power of playing God and I like to imagine things. You
can imagine. It's the power of concretizing a metaphor.
Taking something and making it real and making it happen
and seeing where it goes. It's a special kind of magic.

TIME: Joss, I realize when I said that that you've actually
done plenty of non-genre stuff.

JW: But it's funny, I keep having to remember that. I
always say, I will never do anything that's not genre.
People go, well, what about Roseanne? I'm like, yeah, okay,
but . . . That to me was genre because it was a sitcom with
real people in it which, to me, was at that point a
fantasy. I always tend to think just left of center, to
remove myself from the world by one step. It is very
freeing, and it's a particular way of coming at stories and
looking at them that I find the most beautiful stuff that I
know comes from, ultimately.

It's all stories about people. I mean, that's all anybody's
writing, with very few exceptions. I can't imagine doing
anything just straight up, unless it was a period piece,
because so much of science fiction is basically creating
history. A fascination with any time that's not ours is
inevitable, so I love period stuff. That's the only thing I
could imagine myself doing right now that wasn't
straight-up fantasy.

TIME: Let's talk about Mirrormask. Is that fantasy?

NG: Sure, Mirrormask is fantasy. Dave McKean—who directed
it and who co-came up with the story—I suspect thinks it's
not fantasy because it's a dream, and because of various
other things, and because Dave is not terribly comfortable
with the idea of fantasy. I'm perfectly comfortable with
fantasy, so I think it's definitely fantasy. But the brief
with Mirrormask was Henson coming to us and saying, in the
Eighties, Henson's did The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. They
were family fantasy films. They cost $40 million each. We'd
like to do another one. We have $4 million. If we gave you
that $4 million, could you come back with a movie, and we
won't tell you what to do? As deals go, it's that bit at
the end that said, we won't tell you what to do that was,
okay, yes, I will happily take not enough money to make a
huge fantasy movie and try and make a huge fantasy movie
with it.

But then, I get fascinated because, in America, it almost
seems like family has become a code word for something that
you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two
hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your
child will not have been exposed to any ideas. I didn't
want to do that. I like the idea of family as something
where a seven-year-old would see a film and get stuff out
of it, and a fifteen-year-old would get something else out
of it, and a 25-year-old would get a different thing out of
it.

JW: That's a difficult thing to explain in this country,
particularly to a ratings board. If you're doing something
that's layered at all, that anybody who's old enough to
understand it can and should, and anybody else won't,
they'll connect to it on a different level. Things get very
codified, very black and white. It's tough.

NG: I got to see the poster for Mirrormask yesterday. I was
delighted at the bottom where it says, PG, Parental
Guidance Suggested, and then underneath they had to give a
reason. It says, 'for some mild thematic elements and scary
images'. I thought, that's cool. It's PG for thematic
elements.

TIME: Mild ones.

NG: Mild ones, but they're thematic. I thought, who comes
up with that?

JW: I've got some violence and I think I have sexual
innuendo. In one sentence, somebody says something vaguely
naughty. I was excited to see how I was going to be pegged,
too.

TIME: You've both written for comic books, on top of all
your other projects. What interests you about that medium?

JW: This is a mythos I grew up with. I never tire of the
heroes that I knew growing up. The fun is not that much
different from doing a television show: You're stuck with a
certain set of rules and then, rather than trying to break
them, it's just trying to peel away and see what's
underneath them. That to me is really fun.

Ultimately, there's no better way to create a fantasy world
than with a great artist. And animation takes a wicked long
time.

TIME: I don't even remember who's in the X-men anymore. Is
Colossus still in it?

JW: Which of the 19,000 books are you talking about? In
mine was the Beast, Kitty Pryde, Cyclops, Emma Frost,
Colossus...and the unpopular one. Wolverine.

TIME: Emma Frost is in the X-men now?

JW: She's been an X-man for some time.

TIME: They do know she used to be a villain, right?

JW: Yes they do. It's all about forgiveness.

NG: There is a tradition in these things.

TIME: Kitty was sort of a proto-Buffy, right?

JW: Kitty was a huge proto-Buffy. I mean, there was no
other you could point to as strongly. And they weren't
really doing anything with her, which, you know, made me
happy to no end. And when they asked me to bring Colossus
back, there I had Kitty and her first love. It was actually
terribly romantic, to me anyway. I think I care way too
much about these characters.

NG: That's also the trouble with comics characters. If you
read them at a certain age, they worm their way into your
psyche. They live in your head. They are as real as anybody
else in there, and you care about them.

JW: I think there's a possibility that comic book movies
are getting a tiny bit better on the one hand because
they're no longer made by executives, who are, you know,
ninety-year-old bald tailors with cigars, going, the kids
love this! But even executives and producers and people who
aren't necessarily creative who are involved in it did
actually grow up with these characters, so there is some
measure of respect. Although we still occasionally get
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and you really can't
explain that.

NG: Or Cat Woman.

JW: Oh my God.

TIME: You're working on Wonder Woman now, right?

JW: I am.

TIME: How's that going?

JW: In my head, it's the finest film ever not typed yet.
It's incredible fun, partially because I was never actually
a huge fan. I never really felt there was . . . there's
been some great work, but never one definitive run on the
book for her, and I'm not a fan of the show. I feel like
I'm taking an icon I already know and creating it for the
first time.

NG: She's such a character without a definitive story. Or
even without a definitive version.

JW: That's how I feel. I hope to change that because I
really feel her. Let's face it: She's an Amazon, and she
will not be denied.

TIME: I'm really hoping her bustier will slip down a little
bit further than it did in the show.

JW: You're just after a porno, aren't you?

TIME: Yes.

JW: It's all about priorities. Yes, it's very empowering
for her to be naked all the time.

TIME: I don't think anybody has filmed your comic books,
Neil.

NG: I think I've actually dodged several bullets, though,
having read scripts of unutterable badness. And even
utterable badness. They did a cover article on me once in
the Hollywood Reporter about two years ago, the entire
thrust of which was that I was the person who sold the most
things to Hollywood without anything getting made, which at
the time I suspect was a completely specious argument
anyway.

Since then, a few things have actually gotten
green-lighted. Coraline is being made by Henry Sellick as a
stop-motion thing. Bob Mackey will start shooting the
Beowulf script that Roger Avary and I did next week. It's
one of his weird motion-capture things.

I just get to see, mostly from a distance, things going
through awful adaptations. Books of Magic —Warner has done
seven scripts on that, and it's now got to the point where
my only response is, why don't you just change the lead
character's name and not call it Books of Magic? You've now
created something that that will do nothing but irritate
anyone who thinks they're going to see a Books of Magic
movie. But it's probably a perfectly decent movie, so just
take the name off it.

JW: Have they ever asked you to write your own?

NG: I did Death: the High Cost of Living, which New Line
are meant to be doing next year. They're going to call it
Death and Me. I did that mostly because it was one of the
things I'd done that was small enough and short enough and
actually had a story shape and I could expand it into a
movie rather than looking gloomily at something huge and
trying to work at what to throw away. I liked that.

But that's barely even a fantasy movie. I mean, it's a
story about a depressed sixteen-year-old who runs into a
girl who claims to be Death, having her one day off every
hundred years, and who may or may not be. It's kind of fun.


But Sandman movies, they just got increasingly appalling.
It was really strange. They started out hiring some really
good people and you got Elliot and Rossieau and Roger Avary
came in and did a draft. They were all solid scripts. And
then John Peters fired all of them and got in some people
who take orders, and who wanted fistfights and all this
stuff. It had no sensibility and it was just...they were
horrible.

TIME: They probably tried to make it into one of those
pornos. Bastards.

JW: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite
something, or look at something that's been gone over, you
can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long
it's been in development.

NG: Yes. It really is this thing of executives loving the
smell of their own urine and urinating on things. And then
more execs come in, and they urinate. And then the next
round. By the end, they have this thing which just smells
like pee, and nobody likes it.

JW: There's really no better way to put it.

TIME: Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is out this month as well,
making it effectively national Goth month.

NG: We are Goth icons. Joss and I. We don't have to be
Goths, because we are Goth icons.

JW: I'm low on mascara. It's weird. I've made my bones with
vampires, but I've never really associated anything I did
with Goth that much, except that I've kind of made fun of
them. I don't really see that as much at the conventions
and stuff in the fan base. It might be somebody in Goth
make-up coming up and saying, oh, this is for my mom.

The great thing for me about the convention is almost the
little microcosm of every society of hardcores. The Jedis
really represented this year. Actually a lot of Siths as
well. And the anime kids and the indie-comic guys. You can
always sort of tell what everybody is into, and there they
all are. There is something both universal and totally
marginal about the crowd. That's what I love.

NG: Last time I was at Comicom, there were like 5,000
people there, and the audience was going to try and cut me
off with stuff to sign. They had to figure out how to get
me off the stage. All of a sudden, I'm getting to the end
of the conversation. Dave McKean and I were doing a
Mirrormask thing and we're ready to leave the stage. I look
up and they have a bodyguard line of 30 Klingons. They're
six-foot six and four-feet wide and they have the foreheads
and they had linked arms. We were being lead off behind a
human wall —a Klingon wall—of Klingon warriors. And I
thought, how good does it get?