by Grady Hendrix

From cult author-cum-filmmaker Neil Gaiman—the endlessly creative genius behind the otherworldly film fantasy MirrorMask, the Sandman graphic novels, the BBC-TV series Neverwhere, and the U.S. adaptation of Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke — comes A Short Film About John Bolton, a darkly hip and hilarious film which explores the question that torments artists of every medium: "Where do your ideas come from?"

Renowned artist John Bolton’s paintings of voluptuous she-vampire nudes have earned this quiet eccentric a reputation for having a "damaged imagination." BBC radio personality Jonathan Ross buys his pieces, which leads interviewer extraordinaire Marcus Brigstocke to find out what the appeal is in Bolton’s beautiful (but terrifying) artwork. Why does Bolton demand that his gallery "monsterpieces" speak for themselves? What does he do with that ornamental knife that he carries everywhere? Will Marcus ever learn how to operate the camera?

Smart and stylish, writer/director Neil Gaiman’s A Short Film About John Bolton is an unforgettable oddity—featuring an exclusive 10-minute interview with Gaiman, appropriately named "A Short Film About A Short Film About John Bolton."

A Short Film About John Bolton is also a throwback to the BBC tradition of screening a ghost story at Christmastime. Going direct to DVD, it’s packed with audio commentary, making of features, footage of Gaiman reading his books, and other material. While finishing the first draft of his new book, Anansi Boys in Ireland, Gaiman took the time to answer some questions about the film and the process.

Newsarama: So, when was A Short Film About John Bolton shot?

Neil Gaiman: We were prepping it in November 2002 and shot it in December 2002, almost exactly two years ago.

NRAMA: You’ve got two big studio directorial projects coming down the turnpike - Death and Me, and The Confessions of William Henry Ireland. What’s the status of these two projects?

NG: Both of them are waiting for me with the novelist head to finish the next novel at which time the me with the filmmaker head is allowed to come back out and play. Death is pretty much ready, they’re just waiting for me to turn in the final draft of the script. When I did the commentary on John Bolton, Death was beginning to roll down the track with Warner Brothers and it got really close and then Warner’s looked around suddenly and said, “Hold on, this is a small film, we don’t make small films,” which is very true. We said, “Okay,” and then it took about a year for them to negotiate a deal with New Line, a Warner’s subsidiary. It all had to be done very careful because it uses Sandman characters that are also owned by Warner’s so they’re not allowed to leave.

On William Henry Ireland, again, I am incredibly remiss. I’m seriously six months late with the novel which I’m on so that everything else is backed up. The William Henry Ireland producers are possibly the most patient and saintly people on the face of the planet as they wait for me to get there.

NRAMA: Back to John Bolton, the point of the film was, somewhat, to practice directing before you tackled these enormous projects. What did you learn?

NG: Actually the most useful bit of practical knowledge I took away from it was learning that you don’t really have to worry about other people’s feelings. I’m normally terribly nice about things, but what people actually respond to best in a director is certainty. Even if you’re wrong, they just like certainty. If they come to you and say “Do we want this in pink or do we want it in yellow?” as long as you say “yellow” and stick to it they will be happy. The other thing that I slowly learned throughout the process is the enormous value of “Because I say so.” There was one scene we did and the first time we did it the cameraman and the lighting guys insisted that we were going to need giant outdoor lights and I was quite certain that we weren’t because we were going to be shooting with infrared cameras. And we actually needed to shoot it once with the giant lights and whatnot in order to convince everybody that we didn’t need them.

But the big thing I took from it was much less a matter of learning specifics than it was of learning huge generalities. Normally as a writer you wind up writing things and then you get kind of disappointed at what people actually do with them. Or if not disappointed you look at it and go “You know, that line was funny when I wrote it, and if I had told him to say it right it would have been funny,” but I never got a chance. I recently wrote a script, Mirrormask, that I have to exclude from this generalization, and I also wrote a script with Bob Zemeckis which wasn’t frustrating in this way. But there’s definitely a level on which you do get frustrated as a writer, especially if you’re a writer like me who has worked in comics and novels where you have a lot more control. Particularly with Death, where it’s too close to my heart to watch somebody else fuck it up, which was my main reason for getting involved - if anyone’s going to fuck it up it’s going to be me.

Of course, then you get into this weird place where you think, “So what if I hate directing? What if it makes me miserable? What if I have either no talent, which is certainly possible, or more important what if it’s simply something that I loathe?” I am somebody who would almost definitely be fired as a runner on my first day on a film set, because if you’re a runner on a film set you are going to need to make sure that you are not stuck in traffic in Camden when whatever it is that’s needed is in Brixton. I am not that kind of person. I am the kind of person where the shelves I put up do not stay up. And I needed to figure out if this is something I wanted to spend a year of my life doing? And if it is, is it something I’m likely to enjoy, because otherwise I’ll do another book or write a book of poetry or something that I know I would enjoy.

NRAMA: And did you enjoy it?

NG: Oh, it was wonderful. It was absolutely a delight. And I found I loved the weird little techie bits which I really didn’t know if I was going to like. The editing process, the sound, all of those weird little bits of assembly you do. And also it was great learning all of those things you learn like if you don’t have the shot you cannot create it in the editing room which is, again, a lovely thing to have learned on something like this.

When you talk to other directors that’s one of the things that they love to say “You’ve got to get the shot.” If you don’t you can be as clever as all get out, but you’re going to have to go back for a long shot or whatever it is you’re missing.

NRAMA: Was this a large-scale endeavor, or a small crew?

NG: It was a fairly small, fairly efficient crew. Dave McKean thought I was mad. Well, I don’t think he thought I was mad, but he was incredibly bemused because it was all his fault. I had Death coming up and it was starting to lumber down the pipes and Dave said, “You really ought to do a short film just to get the hang of things. Just make a short film.” So he came along during the shoot, and he turned to me at some point and said, “You know, when I said make a short film I just meant you, three friends and a camera, just sort of assembling it on your iMac. I didn’t actually mean doing a full scale production.” But it was too late by then, I couldn’t stop.

NRAMA: You mention on the audio commentary that Dave McKean shot some of the film. What was he responsible for?

NG: Dave was basically just there with a camera one day. It was the day we did all the gallery stuff and we gave him a camera and he had a marvelous time shooting lots and lots and lots of really cool lovely party shots, none of which we were able to use. There’s one shot we did use just because it seemed perfect for what we were doing, and that is of the John Bolton character coming down off the stage and complaining to Carolyn that he should have said more and you can see our film crew in the background filming him.

NRAMA: You’re a writer who’s much prized for your imagination, so why on earth did you choose to make a film that orbits around vampire ladies with enormous breasts, which are just about the worst kind of horror comic cliché?

NG: The reason had much more to do with the fact that John has spent his life painting these incredibly gorgeous naked vampire ladies - many of whose breasts are actually of normal size I should say in deference to John seeing that he is in an industry in which naked vampire ladies with enormous breasts are obviously at a premium. John’s breasts...I mean, the breasts of John’s vampires are very often quite petite. He’s been doing these paintings for years, and one of the things that you think about when you’re putting together a small film is how and where do you save money. How do you create cool effects very cheaply? The thing that would make this film very difficult to do in Hollywood is that you’re going to have to get the Art Department to create the paintings and you’ll get that strange thing you have in Hollywood movies whenever painters are involved when people say, “She is the greatest painter in the world - look!” And you look and you see something that was painted in the Art Department that morning and it doesn’t really look like much. But these things existed, and I thought that was a lovely resource. In actual fact, I think the crew was a lot more excited about the nudity than I was because they thought they were actually going to see some, but what they failed to understand was the moment that any clothes came off all the lights went off as well because it was being shot through the infrared.

NRAMA: What was John’s reaction to all of this?

NG: John, I think, was enormously bemused and quite pleased. Obviously the joy of the film is as much the way one tells the story as the story itself. Trying to take a story that, at the end of the day, could easily have been a Twilight Zone episode but telling it in a totally different way. There’s all these sort of odd techniques, some of which began with This is Spinal Tap, The Office and so forth and none of them have ever been taken and sort of played around with small, odd things before. So I got to go in and play around.

NRAMA: You seem more than a little obsessed with the notion of where you get your ideas. Why the obsession?

NG: I think all writers orbit that question: where do ideas come from? Where do you get your ideas? Why do you write the stuff you write? All writers have funny stock answers that they will give you; either offended funny stock answers or amused funny stock answers. They’ll tell you they get their ideas from the Idea of the Month Club or a little idea shop in Poughkeepsie or whatever, and that’s because they just don’t know, it scares them. I remember there was a period when it seemed like everything that Stephen King wrote, at the end of the day, was all about where do the ideas come from and what if they stopped. And you don’t know, but you may as well tackle it head on, you may as well talk about it. For most people the big subjects are sex and death. For writers the big ideas are sex, death and where do you get your ideas. And I like to think I got all of them into John Bolton, which, at 28 minutes, is quite good actually.

NRAMA: So, with a 28-minute movie in hand, there’s got to be something else on the disc? What’s on there?

NG: I’ve got a half hour long film which traditionally not a lot of people run out to buy, so we decided to pack the DVD with stuff so nobody would feel ripped off for having bought this half hour film. One of the things we gave them was a mini-documentary “Live at the Aladdin” and what’s nice about that is it has some legal defense fund stuff and some First Amendment stuff on it.

NRAMA: In the past you’ve grown your beard as a good luck totem when embarking on a large project. Did you rely on anything besides the beard for A Short Film About John Bolton?

NG: I relied entirely on the beard. Richard Curtis [director of Love Actually) explained that he was wearing lucky underpants and that I should, too. I thought it was a really good idea except he was shooting Love Actually at the time and was already wearing his lucky underpants and the idea of having to borrow Richard’s lucky underpants for a three-day shoot was daunting. He might have had three real crap days of Love Actually and my skin would have crawled. He’s a lovely man, but I don’t want to wear his underpants. So I was happy with the beard. And trusting actors. I realized that so much of what works is just a matter of picking the right cast at auditions and then trusting them. Marcus as the interviewer is lovely because his presence slowly permeates the movie. He’s just earnest enough and just full of himself enough that you can believe him completely as an arts interviewer and you can read his mind every step of the way which is fun. I was very proud of our wardrobe lady. I said I wanted him in the kind of interviewer clothing that the interviewer is sure he looks terrific in and everybody else thinks looks crap.

And she pulled it off terrifically.

NRAMA: On one final point, you’re actively involved with the CBLDF, but you don’t seem to have had any censorship trouble yourself? Given the current political climate, do you ever have an urge to do something that you know will stir up trouble just to make a point?

NG: I can’t. Even when I create stuff where I go, “My god this is going to have people throwing bricks through my windows,” nobody ever does. When we were writing Good Omens, Terry Pratchet and I were quite sure we were going to have to go find Salman Rushdie and start sleeping in his back room, and we got nominated for a religious award. I shrug. You just make art and let the world carry on. The Richie Rich thing worries me, speaking as an individual and not as a member of the board of directors of the CBLDF, because it’s a place I haven’t seen America get involved with censorship before. I’m very used to the customs officials both in England and in Canada operating as a de facto censorship organization, but it’s something that I don’t believe US Customs hitherto has taken on. Without being able to go into the head of the Customs person in question it really would appear that it’s a case of stamping out ridicule of the president, which I think has got to be incredibly dodgy. Whoever is president, it’s got to be dodgy. You do a four page Richie Rich comic in which you take the contents of Harvey Comics, or the former content of the former Harvey Comics, and replace it with presidential parody, that’s the oldest way of doing parody. Obviously you don’t have Sesame Street suing Avenue Q. You’re taking one kind of format and inhabiting it with another kind of content and you’re creating a third thing which is parodic commentary. The Richie Bush strip is very obviously that. It’s dodgy and I’m very puzzled. I’ve been actively involved with the CBLDF for about 12 years now, on the board of directors for the last five or thereabouts, and I’ve never run into anything like this. You don’t get US customs acting in a censorship capacity and suddenly they are.

A Short Film About John Bolton can be found at Amazon and other online outlets.