Dave McKeans first love was comics, but the artist, designer and writer has branched into other fields, creating book and album covers, publishing multiple books of his photographs and paintings, and has even drawn stamps for the Royal Mail. Hes the illustrator of Arkham Asylum, the landmark 1989 graphic novel written by Grant Morrison. He worked with John Cale on multiple books and collaborated with Heston Blumenthal on the memoir and cookbook, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook.
McKean is probably best known for his many collaborations with writer Neil Gaiman. McKean was the cover artist on The Sandman, illustrated Coraline and The Graveyard Book and the pair have created a series of graphic novels and picture books including Violent Cases, Signal to Noise and Mr. Punch. One of their collaborations was the film Mirrormask, which McKean co-wrote, designed and directed. Its led to another career as a filmmaker, with two films currently in progress.
Working on his own, McKean has crafted dozens of short comics, many of which were collected in the book Pictures That Tick and authored Cages which is widely considered one of the most acclaimed and ambitious graphic novels ever created. McKeans new book is Celluloid which was published by Delcourt in France and was just released by Fantagraphics in the United States.
ALEX DUEBEN: Its funny because a number of people when writing about the book have talked about it as your return to comics, because it feels like youve never left.
DAVE MCKEAN: Yes. Its strange. Ive never really left doing comics. Its still my first love. Ive done a few other things yes, but Ive always done other things. It doesnt really feel like a return.
AD: I suppose part of thats because more recently most of your comics work has been shorter pieces for anthologies.
DM: Thats true, it is longer, but I dont really draw hard lines between these things. Ive done long books for other people and they havent necessarily been all comics but they have always included bits of comics whether theyre childrens books or the book I did with John Cale. Theyre not full length graphic novels, but I dont really think of compartmentalizing them so much. Theyre just books.
AD: Your first graphic novel, Cages, is considered by one of the great graphic novels by many people, myself included. Celluloid is a much smaller book both in terms of scale and length. Where did it start?
DM: Well it started in Cages. One of the things I really fancied doing in Cages was to have the couple on the roof and just do a proper un-embarrassed sex scene. In a five hundred page book, it would have made the book an x-rated book, just from those few pages, so in the end I backed off from doing that. Im always surprised that sex is not treated in comics very much at all. Pornography generally is pretty awful and boring and repetitive and pretty miserable to look at from any sort of aesthetic point of view. All of these things hung around in my head, just waiting for a place to be.
I was originally thinking of doing it as a completely private book. It wouldnt have a name. It wouldnt have my name on it. It would be completely private. I would print a couple hundred copies and not sell them in shops. You would have to know where to go to get them. Maybe wed just sell them under the table at conventions or just sell them through a website that you had to know the access code to. I like that secret knowledge thing. Guy Delcourt at Delcourt Editions in France offered to publish it when I was talking to him about it. It just seemed like a perfect match really. Thats why it ended up being that way.
AD: You did a short story for a Delcourt anthology recently.
DM: I did a short story for them, yeah. I really enjoyed doing it. Originally it had dialogue and I just wasnt feeling the dialogue. It wasnt bad dialogue but it just didnt seem to have a purpose. It just needed to be there because there seemed to be an obligation for these people to talk to each other, but I didnt really see it was necessary. You could put the story across perfectly well without any words. Dialogue during a sex scene is usually pretty perfunctory, so that also led into Celluloid. I was pretty sure I didnt want any words in it and that confirmed it really
AD: I feel odd discussing the book and breaking it apart. I keep thinking of the phrase talking about music is like dancing about architecture because the book has no dialogue, no text, no description, no author bio. Theres the title, your name, the copyright info and thats all.
DM: No. (laughs) Very cagey.
AD: Was the packaging just an extension of the idea of a private book?
DM: I didnt really want it to be confused with the childrens books that I do. Thats obviously very different thing for a completely different audience. I didnt want any confusion there. It feels odd enough doing this book. Its always a bit strange doing something that is exclusively about sex and putting it out for people to look at. There are people who are bound to draw some sort of parallel between you as an individual and the stuff youre putting in the book, which is not necessarily there to be drawn, but people do. So I tried to keep my identity out of it as much as possible. I went, okay, I will put my name on it but I dont want to have my picture in there or to have any bio or anything that relates to anything else Ive done. Thankfully Guy was really happy to oblige with all that. And it adds to the feel of it. Even though it does have my name on it, it still feels like a secret thing.
AD: The book snuck out rather than had a big release.
DM: Snuck out? Maybe. It would be nice if people just discovered it because its just there, even in a couple years time. Im not mentioning it in my biographies generally and thats fine by me. Its just what it is. I always like Woody Allens thing about trying to keep the release of his films as low key as possible. He doesnt like big premieres. He goes to work, puts out a film every year, doesnt make a fuss about it. I like that.
AD: As you say, creating erotica is an odd thing, what drew you to working in this genre?
DM: Even thinking of it as a genre is slightly strange. I dont really think of sex as a genre. Its just part of my life. (laughs) Unlike a lot of stuff that you usually end up with, especially in comics, violence and stuff that, I dont come upon violence in my life. I dont find violence particularly amusing or entertaining, so Ill happy avoid it. Whereas sex is a perfectly happy, healthy thing. I think most of us think about sex, well, at least every week, probably every day. (laughs) Its strange to think of it as a genre, some sort of side thing like detective fiction. Its not. Its just part of life.
AD: Besides the formal constraints - no words - were there any other restrictions or guidelines you placed on yourself?
DM: Yeah. Loads. (laughs) I mean if Im deciding to do this episodic thing, breaking down a sex scene into a series of chapters, each one dealing with one little part of what is an overall sex scene, theres all sorts of areas where I personally didnt want to go. Anything relating sex to violence, even play violence, I wouldnt go near. Personally, I just think theyre totally opposite impulses. And there was all kinds of other things I just really didnt want to go near. The list of donts was probably a lot bigger than dos. I think theres something to be said for breaking all taboos and just letting it all hang out and doing whatever you want. The Marquis de Sadean way of writing. And theres something else to be said for taking personally responsibility for what you do and I think Ill probably err on the latter. Maybe in a future book I might not, but for this one I definitely had a list of things that I felt queasy about. I wanted to try and do something that was beautiful and tickles the mind and is enticing and an awful lot of pornography is really pretty off-putting and gynecological.
AD: I was wondering if you could talk about the use of color and its role in the book.
DM: Well I wasnt really using color literally. Its there for a reason. Theres very little color there in the beginning. I dont really have much for the color to do at the beginning. Then depending on the theme, the color just adds to the mood I think. The red in the devil sequence is obviously there as a sort of stain of excitement and blood flowing and all those sorts of things. Natural greens and blues in the outside natural scene. Its pretty obvious, but I just wanted it to help to create the mood for that moment. Each part of the overall sex scene has certain feelings and sensations along with it and I was just trying to capture those sensations in the color and the marks and whether its painted or drawn or whether its just a line. Lines and colors are loaded with feeling and meaning so I was just trying to make them all describe the same thing, the same moment, the same feeling. Its like music really, speaking of tap dancing about architecture, its closer to music really. Music just goes straight in. You dont need a book to decipher what youre listening to. If it feels pastoral or if it feels aggressive or if it feels funny. Musical notes can make you laugh if theyre played correctly. It just goes straight in and thats what I was trying to do with this. No text. No explanations. You either go into that world and into those scenes and feel it, or not.
AD: A lot of what Ive read about the book because the main character is a woman who goes from watching to taking part, have written about it in terms of voyeurism.
DM: Yes, the voyeuristic thing is really interesting. Its slightly dangerous. Thats why I ended up making it from a womans point of view. Again it was in my list of donts. I think I would feel queasy if it was a man wandering around. I was happy with it being obviously fantasy rather than a realistic story. It was about the fantasy of sex. It was not about the moral obligations and these are real people and real wives and children. I didnt want to get into that. Its not that. It was just tickling the mind. You close your eyes and have a fantasy. And so having a woman at the center of it would be a better scenario than a predatory male. Does that make sense?
But the voyeuristic thing is always interesting. Theres a lovely film, its actually a kind of mediocre film but it is really interesting, called The Lickerish Quartet by Radley Metzger. That was a big influence on this. Its one of those seventies b-films and its not very well done but its got some really lovely ideas in it. Its a bit of a landmark with regards to sex in the cinema. There are a few films like that. Theres a film called Ecstasy from the twenties with Hedy Lamarr before she was famous. Thats another one. A very, very beautiful, strange mysterious film. Its a fantasy involving a woman wandering around and shes naked in the film. This was before cinema really closed up with the Hays code and censorship. Those strange little things that are not really pornography, but they are dealing with sex and eroticism and the way our minds tease us with sex. I think those things are interesting.
AD: My first thought wasnt voyeurism. I kept thinking of the story in terms of art, because of course we go from viewing art to creating it.
DM: Yes, absolutely. Thats a perfectly good reading of it. You dive in and you absorb you get into the atmosphere and you head towards something and you end up inside it. Whether you actually end up where you thought youd be is something else.
AD: I read that youre assembling collection of short comics, a sort of sequel to Pictures That Tick, can we expect that soon?
DM: Its nearly finished. And its a lot. It doesnt really feel like Ive been away from comics because Ive got three hundred pages worth of short comics that are going in this book. Theres lot of very short ones but they include two longer pieces which were both exhibitions. The story took place within the exhibition and then I made a book version of the exhibitions.
AD: I read about The Rut which was an exhibition in Battersea in London last year which I didnt see but I saw photos of it. You had work on the walls, the floors, what were you trying to do there?
DM: Well that was a situation where the space was offered. It was being curated by a guy called Paul Gravett whos very much the man in the middle of the comics industry here, well, there isnt really an industry, but the comics world here in England. He published Violent Cases, my first book with Neil Gaiman way back when. It was called Hypercomics. He wanted four people to explore new ways of telling stories. And it seemed to me that this space was so beautiful, it was on the third floor, it was overlooking the park, and it seemed to me that it would be good to try to tell a story that is truly interactive. Its not clear youre not necessarily reading a sequence, youre exploring the room. The story is the room and youre piecing it together from that. As you enter the room there are a few images to sort of lead you in and they are in sequence and then the story very obviously splits into three possible futures involving three different characters. You can kind of follow them, but they fragment, and then they meet up at some indeterminate time in the future with three possible outcomes to this event. Its really down to you to decide whats true and whats not true. There were clues in the room. Its based on something that happened to me, so it is an actual thing, there is an actual truth at the center of it. What that is, is hard to discern. Its a bit of a memory trick story. Its what happens when you remember something and youre not sure that youre actually remembering it correctly. Maybe youre just remembering a memory which is already degraded. By the time twenty-thirty years goes by, what was the actual truth back then? Its really hard to work it out. Some of the story took place on the windows. There were images on the windows and they related to what was actually going on in the real world beyond the window. It was amazing to do. Quite fun. And there was a dead body hidden behind a screen and some people didnt even see that. Some people went around the room and didnt see that, so when they got out they didnt know what their friends were talking about with the strange red figure with the horned mask. That was great. I really liked that sort of thing.
AD: Other than sequencing the images, did you have to do anything else to make it work on page?
DM: No, I just ended up kind of having to give it some sort of page sequence. Thats the trouble with books. Obviously its a wonderful thing about books. It means you can take people through the story in the way that you want them to. This was designed as an interactive thing, so its a bit of a mismatch, but I wanted to document it in some way. I ended up forcing a sequence on it. Something of the splitting story is retained and it does kind of fragment towards the end and you just have a collection of spreads that document the room. So to a degree you can still make of it what you will. But its not the room. The room was the ideal way of seeing it, but then it will never be seen again. It was dissembled. It was created specifically for that space and now Im starting to exhibit some of the drawings on their own and selling them. Itll never be seen again, so its nice to have a record of it at the very least.
The other exhibition story was called The Coast Road. That took place along the South coast of England. The gallery that we showed at was right in the center of the pathway along the whole of the South coast. That went really, really well. That was a sequence with an order, but what Id hoped people would do, they did. Usually people walk into a gallery space, head for something they like the look of and then just wander around a bit in no particular order. People came, headed towards something and very quickly realized hang on theres a sequence, so then theyd go back to the beginning by the front door. Instead of ten minutes, theyd spend an hour. I think it was quite a moving story and we had a lovely reaction to that. We had a few people in tears by the end.
AD: I would be remiss if I didnt ask about Neil Gaiman. The two of you always seem to working on something together.
DM: Pretty much. The last year or so is pretty much the only time weve ever not had something in the works. Weve both been completely absorbed with other things. Just now Neils been sending me chunks of a new childrens book.
AD: Youve been working on a film for a few years now, Luna. Many of us loved Mirrormask and just wondering what you would do next in film.
DM: A couple of years after finishing Mirrormask, I shot another film. Unfortunately all the things that were great about the process of making Mirrormask, the ease of getting the money from Sony Pictures was ridiculous and the production side of Mirrormask was so easy, the production side of Luna has been a nightmare. The making of Mirrormask, spending eighteen months in a studio endlessly compositing animated shots, was torture, whereas the editing process and actually working on Luna has been wonderful. Im really really happy with it so far. The whole film is shot and 98% of it is edited so theres just a last little bit to do. We just had to keep on stopping and refinancing. We havent gone over budget. For some reason, theyve just found it very difficult to get the money to stay put. It looks like the final bit of money we needed to finish up the effects shots, the sound and the music is now there, so well be working on that through the rest of the year.
The thing that slightly got in the way of it also is that Ive shot now a third film, which came about very, very quickly and strangely. I was in Oberammergau, which is in Germany, at a passion play. I went with Michael Sheen cause we were thinking of doing a book together. At Easter this year he did a passion play in his hometown of Port Townsend. Thats why he was there doing research. It was a three day live theatrical event and 10,000 people showed up to see it. It took place in the whole town. Thousands of people involved.
Its a contemporary secular version of the Easter story. He played a Welsh teacher who goes missing from the town for forty days and forty nights. He loses his memory and his mind and then comes back to the town as this character called the teacher and he has come to listen. All the beats of the Easter story are played out ending with him being crucified on a roundabout by the seafront on Sunday night. I agreed to shot it as a film. Well, I suggested it, and I probably should have kept my mouth shut. I was there with a crew of ten cameras and then there were various other little camera crews. The BBC was there doing a documentary. Ive just had all the footage delivered back to me so through the rest of the year Im going to be trying to edit this into some kind of feature film. The film will be called The Gospel of Us.
AD: As a last question. Is there anything you havent tried or something youd like to do more of?
DM: I really want to do either one or two really good comics. I was very happy with Cages and I still am very happy with it. Im very happy with Pictures That Tick. This new collection of short stories, Im very happy with that. Id love to do one or two proper graphic novels that Im really happy with. And Id love to make a film that Im really happy with. Im really delighted when people liked Mirrormask, but for me, the process of doing it was so painful that I find it very hard to watch. I would love to make a film that Im really happy with. Thats the main thing really. I think Ive probably spent too much time being very fragmented and getting very excited about doing other things, photography or stage design or various other things. Id love to do a really good film and a couple of really good graphic novels. My ambition at the moment is to stay home and draw. (laughs)
McKean is probably best known for his many collaborations with writer Neil Gaiman. McKean was the cover artist on The Sandman, illustrated Coraline and The Graveyard Book and the pair have created a series of graphic novels and picture books including Violent Cases, Signal to Noise and Mr. Punch. One of their collaborations was the film Mirrormask, which McKean co-wrote, designed and directed. Its led to another career as a filmmaker, with two films currently in progress.
Working on his own, McKean has crafted dozens of short comics, many of which were collected in the book Pictures That Tick and authored Cages which is widely considered one of the most acclaimed and ambitious graphic novels ever created. McKeans new book is Celluloid which was published by Delcourt in France and was just released by Fantagraphics in the United States.
ALEX DUEBEN: Its funny because a number of people when writing about the book have talked about it as your return to comics, because it feels like youve never left.
DAVE MCKEAN: Yes. Its strange. Ive never really left doing comics. Its still my first love. Ive done a few other things yes, but Ive always done other things. It doesnt really feel like a return.
AD: I suppose part of thats because more recently most of your comics work has been shorter pieces for anthologies.
DM: Thats true, it is longer, but I dont really draw hard lines between these things. Ive done long books for other people and they havent necessarily been all comics but they have always included bits of comics whether theyre childrens books or the book I did with John Cale. Theyre not full length graphic novels, but I dont really think of compartmentalizing them so much. Theyre just books.
AD: Your first graphic novel, Cages, is considered by one of the great graphic novels by many people, myself included. Celluloid is a much smaller book both in terms of scale and length. Where did it start?
DM: Well it started in Cages. One of the things I really fancied doing in Cages was to have the couple on the roof and just do a proper un-embarrassed sex scene. In a five hundred page book, it would have made the book an x-rated book, just from those few pages, so in the end I backed off from doing that. Im always surprised that sex is not treated in comics very much at all. Pornography generally is pretty awful and boring and repetitive and pretty miserable to look at from any sort of aesthetic point of view. All of these things hung around in my head, just waiting for a place to be.
I was originally thinking of doing it as a completely private book. It wouldnt have a name. It wouldnt have my name on it. It would be completely private. I would print a couple hundred copies and not sell them in shops. You would have to know where to go to get them. Maybe wed just sell them under the table at conventions or just sell them through a website that you had to know the access code to. I like that secret knowledge thing. Guy Delcourt at Delcourt Editions in France offered to publish it when I was talking to him about it. It just seemed like a perfect match really. Thats why it ended up being that way.
AD: You did a short story for a Delcourt anthology recently.
DM: I did a short story for them, yeah. I really enjoyed doing it. Originally it had dialogue and I just wasnt feeling the dialogue. It wasnt bad dialogue but it just didnt seem to have a purpose. It just needed to be there because there seemed to be an obligation for these people to talk to each other, but I didnt really see it was necessary. You could put the story across perfectly well without any words. Dialogue during a sex scene is usually pretty perfunctory, so that also led into Celluloid. I was pretty sure I didnt want any words in it and that confirmed it really
AD: I feel odd discussing the book and breaking it apart. I keep thinking of the phrase talking about music is like dancing about architecture because the book has no dialogue, no text, no description, no author bio. Theres the title, your name, the copyright info and thats all.
DM: No. (laughs) Very cagey.
AD: Was the packaging just an extension of the idea of a private book?
DM: I didnt really want it to be confused with the childrens books that I do. Thats obviously very different thing for a completely different audience. I didnt want any confusion there. It feels odd enough doing this book. Its always a bit strange doing something that is exclusively about sex and putting it out for people to look at. There are people who are bound to draw some sort of parallel between you as an individual and the stuff youre putting in the book, which is not necessarily there to be drawn, but people do. So I tried to keep my identity out of it as much as possible. I went, okay, I will put my name on it but I dont want to have my picture in there or to have any bio or anything that relates to anything else Ive done. Thankfully Guy was really happy to oblige with all that. And it adds to the feel of it. Even though it does have my name on it, it still feels like a secret thing.
AD: The book snuck out rather than had a big release.
DM: Snuck out? Maybe. It would be nice if people just discovered it because its just there, even in a couple years time. Im not mentioning it in my biographies generally and thats fine by me. Its just what it is. I always like Woody Allens thing about trying to keep the release of his films as low key as possible. He doesnt like big premieres. He goes to work, puts out a film every year, doesnt make a fuss about it. I like that.
AD: As you say, creating erotica is an odd thing, what drew you to working in this genre?
DM: Even thinking of it as a genre is slightly strange. I dont really think of sex as a genre. Its just part of my life. (laughs) Unlike a lot of stuff that you usually end up with, especially in comics, violence and stuff that, I dont come upon violence in my life. I dont find violence particularly amusing or entertaining, so Ill happy avoid it. Whereas sex is a perfectly happy, healthy thing. I think most of us think about sex, well, at least every week, probably every day. (laughs) Its strange to think of it as a genre, some sort of side thing like detective fiction. Its not. Its just part of life.
AD: Besides the formal constraints - no words - were there any other restrictions or guidelines you placed on yourself?
DM: Yeah. Loads. (laughs) I mean if Im deciding to do this episodic thing, breaking down a sex scene into a series of chapters, each one dealing with one little part of what is an overall sex scene, theres all sorts of areas where I personally didnt want to go. Anything relating sex to violence, even play violence, I wouldnt go near. Personally, I just think theyre totally opposite impulses. And there was all kinds of other things I just really didnt want to go near. The list of donts was probably a lot bigger than dos. I think theres something to be said for breaking all taboos and just letting it all hang out and doing whatever you want. The Marquis de Sadean way of writing. And theres something else to be said for taking personally responsibility for what you do and I think Ill probably err on the latter. Maybe in a future book I might not, but for this one I definitely had a list of things that I felt queasy about. I wanted to try and do something that was beautiful and tickles the mind and is enticing and an awful lot of pornography is really pretty off-putting and gynecological.
AD: I was wondering if you could talk about the use of color and its role in the book.
DM: Well I wasnt really using color literally. Its there for a reason. Theres very little color there in the beginning. I dont really have much for the color to do at the beginning. Then depending on the theme, the color just adds to the mood I think. The red in the devil sequence is obviously there as a sort of stain of excitement and blood flowing and all those sorts of things. Natural greens and blues in the outside natural scene. Its pretty obvious, but I just wanted it to help to create the mood for that moment. Each part of the overall sex scene has certain feelings and sensations along with it and I was just trying to capture those sensations in the color and the marks and whether its painted or drawn or whether its just a line. Lines and colors are loaded with feeling and meaning so I was just trying to make them all describe the same thing, the same moment, the same feeling. Its like music really, speaking of tap dancing about architecture, its closer to music really. Music just goes straight in. You dont need a book to decipher what youre listening to. If it feels pastoral or if it feels aggressive or if it feels funny. Musical notes can make you laugh if theyre played correctly. It just goes straight in and thats what I was trying to do with this. No text. No explanations. You either go into that world and into those scenes and feel it, or not.
AD: A lot of what Ive read about the book because the main character is a woman who goes from watching to taking part, have written about it in terms of voyeurism.
DM: Yes, the voyeuristic thing is really interesting. Its slightly dangerous. Thats why I ended up making it from a womans point of view. Again it was in my list of donts. I think I would feel queasy if it was a man wandering around. I was happy with it being obviously fantasy rather than a realistic story. It was about the fantasy of sex. It was not about the moral obligations and these are real people and real wives and children. I didnt want to get into that. Its not that. It was just tickling the mind. You close your eyes and have a fantasy. And so having a woman at the center of it would be a better scenario than a predatory male. Does that make sense?
But the voyeuristic thing is always interesting. Theres a lovely film, its actually a kind of mediocre film but it is really interesting, called The Lickerish Quartet by Radley Metzger. That was a big influence on this. Its one of those seventies b-films and its not very well done but its got some really lovely ideas in it. Its a bit of a landmark with regards to sex in the cinema. There are a few films like that. Theres a film called Ecstasy from the twenties with Hedy Lamarr before she was famous. Thats another one. A very, very beautiful, strange mysterious film. Its a fantasy involving a woman wandering around and shes naked in the film. This was before cinema really closed up with the Hays code and censorship. Those strange little things that are not really pornography, but they are dealing with sex and eroticism and the way our minds tease us with sex. I think those things are interesting.
AD: My first thought wasnt voyeurism. I kept thinking of the story in terms of art, because of course we go from viewing art to creating it.
DM: Yes, absolutely. Thats a perfectly good reading of it. You dive in and you absorb you get into the atmosphere and you head towards something and you end up inside it. Whether you actually end up where you thought youd be is something else.
AD: I read that youre assembling collection of short comics, a sort of sequel to Pictures That Tick, can we expect that soon?
DM: Its nearly finished. And its a lot. It doesnt really feel like Ive been away from comics because Ive got three hundred pages worth of short comics that are going in this book. Theres lot of very short ones but they include two longer pieces which were both exhibitions. The story took place within the exhibition and then I made a book version of the exhibitions.
AD: I read about The Rut which was an exhibition in Battersea in London last year which I didnt see but I saw photos of it. You had work on the walls, the floors, what were you trying to do there?
DM: Well that was a situation where the space was offered. It was being curated by a guy called Paul Gravett whos very much the man in the middle of the comics industry here, well, there isnt really an industry, but the comics world here in England. He published Violent Cases, my first book with Neil Gaiman way back when. It was called Hypercomics. He wanted four people to explore new ways of telling stories. And it seemed to me that this space was so beautiful, it was on the third floor, it was overlooking the park, and it seemed to me that it would be good to try to tell a story that is truly interactive. Its not clear youre not necessarily reading a sequence, youre exploring the room. The story is the room and youre piecing it together from that. As you enter the room there are a few images to sort of lead you in and they are in sequence and then the story very obviously splits into three possible futures involving three different characters. You can kind of follow them, but they fragment, and then they meet up at some indeterminate time in the future with three possible outcomes to this event. Its really down to you to decide whats true and whats not true. There were clues in the room. Its based on something that happened to me, so it is an actual thing, there is an actual truth at the center of it. What that is, is hard to discern. Its a bit of a memory trick story. Its what happens when you remember something and youre not sure that youre actually remembering it correctly. Maybe youre just remembering a memory which is already degraded. By the time twenty-thirty years goes by, what was the actual truth back then? Its really hard to work it out. Some of the story took place on the windows. There were images on the windows and they related to what was actually going on in the real world beyond the window. It was amazing to do. Quite fun. And there was a dead body hidden behind a screen and some people didnt even see that. Some people went around the room and didnt see that, so when they got out they didnt know what their friends were talking about with the strange red figure with the horned mask. That was great. I really liked that sort of thing.
AD: Other than sequencing the images, did you have to do anything else to make it work on page?
DM: No, I just ended up kind of having to give it some sort of page sequence. Thats the trouble with books. Obviously its a wonderful thing about books. It means you can take people through the story in the way that you want them to. This was designed as an interactive thing, so its a bit of a mismatch, but I wanted to document it in some way. I ended up forcing a sequence on it. Something of the splitting story is retained and it does kind of fragment towards the end and you just have a collection of spreads that document the room. So to a degree you can still make of it what you will. But its not the room. The room was the ideal way of seeing it, but then it will never be seen again. It was dissembled. It was created specifically for that space and now Im starting to exhibit some of the drawings on their own and selling them. Itll never be seen again, so its nice to have a record of it at the very least.
The other exhibition story was called The Coast Road. That took place along the South coast of England. The gallery that we showed at was right in the center of the pathway along the whole of the South coast. That went really, really well. That was a sequence with an order, but what Id hoped people would do, they did. Usually people walk into a gallery space, head for something they like the look of and then just wander around a bit in no particular order. People came, headed towards something and very quickly realized hang on theres a sequence, so then theyd go back to the beginning by the front door. Instead of ten minutes, theyd spend an hour. I think it was quite a moving story and we had a lovely reaction to that. We had a few people in tears by the end.
AD: I would be remiss if I didnt ask about Neil Gaiman. The two of you always seem to working on something together.
DM: Pretty much. The last year or so is pretty much the only time weve ever not had something in the works. Weve both been completely absorbed with other things. Just now Neils been sending me chunks of a new childrens book.
AD: Youve been working on a film for a few years now, Luna. Many of us loved Mirrormask and just wondering what you would do next in film.
DM: A couple of years after finishing Mirrormask, I shot another film. Unfortunately all the things that were great about the process of making Mirrormask, the ease of getting the money from Sony Pictures was ridiculous and the production side of Mirrormask was so easy, the production side of Luna has been a nightmare. The making of Mirrormask, spending eighteen months in a studio endlessly compositing animated shots, was torture, whereas the editing process and actually working on Luna has been wonderful. Im really really happy with it so far. The whole film is shot and 98% of it is edited so theres just a last little bit to do. We just had to keep on stopping and refinancing. We havent gone over budget. For some reason, theyve just found it very difficult to get the money to stay put. It looks like the final bit of money we needed to finish up the effects shots, the sound and the music is now there, so well be working on that through the rest of the year.
The thing that slightly got in the way of it also is that Ive shot now a third film, which came about very, very quickly and strangely. I was in Oberammergau, which is in Germany, at a passion play. I went with Michael Sheen cause we were thinking of doing a book together. At Easter this year he did a passion play in his hometown of Port Townsend. Thats why he was there doing research. It was a three day live theatrical event and 10,000 people showed up to see it. It took place in the whole town. Thousands of people involved.
Its a contemporary secular version of the Easter story. He played a Welsh teacher who goes missing from the town for forty days and forty nights. He loses his memory and his mind and then comes back to the town as this character called the teacher and he has come to listen. All the beats of the Easter story are played out ending with him being crucified on a roundabout by the seafront on Sunday night. I agreed to shot it as a film. Well, I suggested it, and I probably should have kept my mouth shut. I was there with a crew of ten cameras and then there were various other little camera crews. The BBC was there doing a documentary. Ive just had all the footage delivered back to me so through the rest of the year Im going to be trying to edit this into some kind of feature film. The film will be called The Gospel of Us.
AD: As a last question. Is there anything you havent tried or something youd like to do more of?
DM: I really want to do either one or two really good comics. I was very happy with Cages and I still am very happy with it. Im very happy with Pictures That Tick. This new collection of short stories, Im very happy with that. Id love to do one or two proper graphic novels that Im really happy with. And Id love to make a film that Im really happy with. Im really delighted when people liked Mirrormask, but for me, the process of doing it was so painful that I find it very hard to watch. I would love to make a film that Im really happy with. Thats the main thing really. I think Ive probably spent too much time being very fragmented and getting very excited about doing other things, photography or stage design or various other things. Id love to do a really good film and a couple of really good graphic novels. My ambition at the moment is to stay home and draw. (laughs)