I just saw an early screening of "The Orphanage" (http://www.theorphanagemovie.com/), laid on for me at a local cinema. A very satisfying, astonishingly creepy ghost story. It's Spanish language, with subtitles. I think it'll be released at the end of December. Brought a bunch of friends and acquaintances, several of whom confessed, on the way out, to having watched it from between their fingers. It was pretty much gore free, and really could have been made at any time in the last forty years -- no noticeable CGI, minimal special effects, just a story that begins with a rising sense of unease and then builds on that, and builds, and builds, until you spend the last half hour with your heart pounding, worried for the characters, actually scared. Quite lovely.
Bill Stiteler was with me, and he blogs about it at http://williamstiteler.birdchick.com/?p=403
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When I was in the UK in Summer by far the silliest interview I had was the one where the interviewer asked me to confirm that Matthew Vaughn had been removed as a director half way through the shooting of Stardust and that the movie was finished off by the producers. It's now up at http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/issue013/exclusives/int_gaiman.php
LWLies: I heard rumours from on set that it was quite a turbulent shoot. Did you spend much time on set and is there any truth in these rumours that Matthew Vaughn found it a very, very difficult film to put together? I heard that the producers more or less ended up taking it off him and finishing it without him.
Gaiman: That’s what we in the business technically call a lie. And that’s not even me being polite, that’s just bollocks. My daughter Holly was in production on the set – she started out as a kind of turning on and turning off the air conditioning runner, and she wound up as a fairly senior production assistant, which she did on her own – so I was getting reports back. It would be impossible for the producers to have taken the film off Matthew and finished it for him because the main producer on this film is Matthew Vaughn. Matthew brought in $30 million worth of the money – he brought half the money to the table. In terms of ‘turbulent shooting’ I was getting phone calls from Holly which would occasionally dish the dirt on whether or not Michelle Pfeiffer was in a good mood that day, but as far as I can tell it wasn’t any more turbulent that any other shoot. it was finished on schedule and nobody took the film away from Matthew, nor could anybody have taken the film away from Matthew.
Amusingly, the magazine it's from is called "Little White Lies". Just as amusingly, it touts itself as Honest, Passionate and Unmerciful: Eschewing hype, gossip and meaningless celebrity, Little White Lies is a magazine that engages with movie lovers who understand that cinema is about broadening your horizons.
Hello there.
I was just looking at the updated articles on the Straight Dope website and found recent mention of you, your brilliant mind, The Kindly Ones GN and Sleeping Beauty's unsavory beginnings.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/071026.html
Thought you might be interested since apparently the self-proclaimed smartest man on the planet is also smart enough to appreciate you, which lends credence to his claim as far as I am concerned.
Cheers!
Alicia
P.S. I loved Stardust and recently went to NYC to catch the Wolves in the Walls production, which was charming and well worth the trip. May you always have such luck with adaptions of your work and I am very much looking forward to whatever comes next!
Labels: fairy tales, The Orphanage, twerps