In a recent interview with premiere.com about the upcoming adaptation of his book 'Coraline', the brilliant Neil Gaiman got to chat about the status of 'Death: The High Cost Of Living' which Gaiman is also set to direct and a possible gig writing Marvels Sorcerer Supreme Dr Strange film script.
Can you talk more about the news about Dr. Strange and Guillermo del Toro?
Well, I don't know that it's really news! The wonderful thing about the Internet is that things get mentioned in interviews or whatever and then they come out and suddenly something is news. I mean, this morning my inbox filled up with people letting me know that it's news that Roger Avary and I are no longer writing Black Hole, and I'm going, "But that was news in December of last year!" [laughs] We pretty much knew that going into the writer's strike, and we definitely knew once David Fincher came onboard after the writer's strike. It's astonishingly old news, it's just hit the thing today.
I would love to write Dr. Strange. It would be absolutely one of my dream jobs [to write] a Dr. Strange movie. Last year I was out in Budapest for three weeks on the set of Hellboy II with Guillermo, and I mentioned to him that I've been, in very very early sort of "I would to do this" talks with Marvel about doing a Dr. Strange movie, and Guillermo's reaction was, "Neil, I want to direct it!" [doing Guillermo del Toro imitation] being wonderfully Guillermo and getting all excited and having all sorts of magical and wonderful ideas about this, and Marvel, I think, were very excited too. But the fact of the matter is, you know, Guillermo has two Hobbit movies now, and then he's probably gonna do another personal movie, I would imagine, after that. Probably Hellboy 3 'cause he'd wanna do it before everybody gets too old to look like the Hellboy characters [laughs]. Although, actually I think he may have thought that one through in different ways. Anyway, the point is we're probably, we may be four years away from Guillermo being free to do it, and I'm not entirely sure I'd want to do it without him. So we'll see.
What's the latest on Death: The High Cost of Living?
Well, I think the latest is that we're all waiting to see what happens to New Line. Death is a very odd thing because, unlike Coraline or Anansi Boys, which I'm doing for Warners, or The Graveyard Book or any of those kinds of things, I don't own and control the rights to Death. I'm attached to it, I've written a script for it, I'm meant to be directing it... but I don't control it, and for reasons having to do with corporate relationships between DC Comics and Warner Brothers, it has to be done by a Warner Brothers company, and then you have to find a Warner Brothers studio within Warner Brothers that will be a good fit for that film, and of course New Line was a really good fit for that film, and it remains to be seen right now what New Line is when the dust is settled and whether there is a New Line or not.
