Happy Sad Confused - Neil Gaiman

Episode Date: April 27, 2017

Neil Gaiman’s fertile imagination has been entertaining and enthralling readers for decades. Whether you know him from his groundbreaking comic-book writing for “The Sandman,” his acclaimed novels like “Stardust” and “The Graveyard Book,” or his writing for film and TV (“Beowulf,” “Doctor Who,” and “Coraline,” just to name a few), if you like imaginative fiction, you’re likely a fan.   This week on Happy Sad Confused, Gaiman joins Josh to discuss one of his most beloved works, American Gods, and its long-awaited television debut. Launching on Starz at the end of April, the show stars Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane, and Gillian Anderson, to name a few, and has received some of the best reviews of any show in 2017.   In this conversation Gaiman discusses the process of bringing “American Gods” to the screen, why he hopes “The Sandman” will also end up on TV, and why he’s sick of grim and gritty superhero films. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Don't miss Swiped, a new movie inspired by the provocative real-life story of the visionary founder of online dating platform Bumble. Played by Lily James, Swiped introduces recent college grad Whitney Wolfe as she uses grit and ingenuity to break into the male-dominated tech industry to become the youngest female self-made billionaire. An official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hulu original film Swiped, is now streaming only on Disney Plus. This week on Happy, Sad Confused, Neil Gaiman on American Gods, Sandman, and Bringing Good Omen to TV. Hey guys, I'm Josh Horowitz. My voice is a little bit hoarse today. Yes, Sammy? What do you? How do I sound? It's not the hoarseness. It's the nasal congestion. How do I sound? Do I sound ill? This week on Happy, Sad Confused. It's all about me, but this is my show, so I'm entitled.

Yes. I just came on a red eye straight to the office, just did a fun interview with Karen Gillen, who's going to be on the show next week. Stay tuned for that. It was delightful, and now we're doing the intro for the Amazing Deal Game. And so, yeah, so I didn't sleep on the plane. You didn't? I didn't.

I'm not good at that, no. Oh, yeah, so I'm not. You're in bad shape, aren't you? And I'm just not like, you know, it will surprise no one to hear that I'm not a, an evolved human being that is capable of dealing with hardships. So one sleepless night and you are in the thick of illness. There's a 20% chance I will be dead next week. Like the color is just draining from your face as we're talking.

We're laughing. This is fucking it, guys. Oh, God. I hope you enjoy Karen Gillen next week. Sammy's going to do the intro. We have a big couple days coming up too. You've got to get yourself in tip-top shape. There's a lot coming up.

We've got, should we say? Yeah, we can say. We got Chris Pratt is, we're doing, we're doing some, a fun interview with Chris Pratt that you'll be able to view very soon for Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2, which is a lot of fun. That little movie. That little movie. That little movie that could. And then, before you know, we're going to be doing, going out to L.A. for movie awards. Yeah, movie and TV awards.

Thank you for the correction. You're welcome. I've been doing it for a decade. It's hard, you know, old habits die hard. It rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? MTV? Yeah, movie and TV awards. So, yeah, we'll be there for that.

a lot of fun stuff to come out of that. But, yeah, this week's show was great. I was so excited to get Neil Gaiman in here. I was actually a little bit intimidated. He's one of the most, like, fertile imaginations on the planet. He's a brilliant writer. He's obviously kind of conquered every medium he's approached, whether it's comic books or TV or film.

And I also, he's one of those guys. I haven't read enough of his stuff. I've certainly read some of his stuff, but I wouldn't, like, pretend to be a Neil Gaiman expert. So, like, part of me was like, am I entitled to dive to dive into this brilliant mind? But I'd also, like, I felt like I heard that he didn't enjoy interviews, but all that stuff throughout the window, this is one of my favorite conversations I've had in a while with a writer that, like, you know, I always, I've said this before. I think I tend to get most excited about, like, the writer directors that come on the show. I love, you know, kicking out and having fun conversations with actors, but there's something.

about talking to somebody that the creators yeah i mean and he's really on another level he's like he's like that gyrmal de torro kind of just like living a really like um you know has such a rich imagination and he's brought so many great works if you don't know him um specifically what his works are but they include you know sandman which is the seminal comic book series that he's been trying to you know adapt into a tv show or film for years there's coralline of course he did the screenplay for Beowulf, Good Omen's, which he's bringing to TV soon. He talks very eloquently in this conversation about adapting that. He's writing the scripts.

He's written all the scripts for Good Omen's, which is adapted from his book with Terry Pratchett, who died, I think, relatively recently in recent years. So that's kind of a burden and a privilege to kind of bring that to the screen without Terry around. And he was very thoughtful about that. And the most significant part of this conversation is American Gods. American Gods. Are you excited for America? I am so excited for American guys. Kristen Chenoweth is in it.

What do you mean? Why am I excited? I didn't know which aspect of you. Because there is a lot. There is kind of something for everybody. But I love fantasy and. Oh, cool. Yeah.

Oh, no, I'm in. Yeah. It's got in great reviews. I've seen the first four episodes and it's very good. I can't wait. It's Brian Fuller who's, you know, did Hannibal and pushing daisies and another great creator by the name Michael Green, who's like a big time screenwriter who has. as a like Blade Runner coming out, a lot of stuff. So anyway, between the two of them and Neil Gaiman, they've brought this to life on stars.

As I said, I saw the first four episodes. It's kind of, it's a hard kind of project to describe in that it has, it's dramatic, it's comedic, it certainly has fantasy in it. It is kind of very, you know, a lot's been written about how it's very relevant to these times. It is an immigrant story, and it is very much inspired by Neil's move to America, 20 plus years, ago when he initially wrote the book, and it features an amazing cast. The lead is a guy by the name of Ricky Whittle, most notable to me for, and Sammy remembers this at Comic-Con. I think there must be video of it up somewhere.

Yeah, there is. At Comic-Con, I did an interview with the whole cast, and Ricky Whittle was sitting next to me and just like, how would you describe it? He just needed to be close to you. Like, and you're not like a touchy kind of, you have a very big space bubble that needs to be respected. And Ricky was, I think at one point he tried to entwine his legs with yours. Yeah, they were entwined.

Yeah, he would like cradled you into his armpit. What's weird, like the interview, I kind of wish the whole interview was on there. Because if there's anything up there, it's a small snippet, it was like a 20-minute conversation, and I'm not exaggerating the entire time he had his arms and legs wrapped around me. I have photos of it and your face, it's like at first you think it's a bit. And when you realize that he's not moving, you just. just like panic. And I had to just like have like a semi-normal conversation with like Neil Gaiman.

Like an intelligent interview while this big beautiful man is wrapped around you. So yes, the big beautiful Ricky Whittle is the star of the show. But it also has a lot of great performers. Ian McShane is amazing in it. It's got Crispin Glover, Kristen Chenowick, a very, Emily Browning, a very eclectic, cool cast. So it's a, I think it's going to get, it's already getting a lot of attention. So get in on it early. Tell your friends.

Beep one of the cool. kids and go check out American gods. And I think that's it. Anything else we want to say? I want to go get some rest, Josh. I'm fine. I'm fine. Oh, he just died.

He just croaked. Remember me. Subscribe and rate. In memory of me, please subscribe and rate. Happy Sank and Fused on iTunes. It's so sad because it's true. Yeah. Well, please do subscribe, rate, and spread the word on Happy Sank Infused.

Enjoy this conversation. Neil Gaiman. We'll see you next week with Karen Gillen, who was delightful. And I'm going to go lie down. Yeah, thank you. Okay. Enjoy this chat. I'm so excited to be joined by Mr. Neil Gaiman here in the MTV podcast studio. Good morning to you, Neil. Good morning. It's like morning drive time. Welcome to the drive time with Neil Gaiman. No, don't worry. It's not that kind of conversation.

We were actually just talking about this. I'm always fascinated by the silliness of press stores and the insanity. And you've been through a couple days of junket. Maybe hell was too strong a word, but it's trying. This was actually interesting. This was junket heck. It never got as far as junket hell, mostly because, A, everybody who turned up loved the show. Yeah.

And there is a, I've never quite experienced that with a junket before. You know, the last huge junker I was on, I think was for Beowulf. Sure. Co-written by me and Roger Avery, where we had a lot of unconvinced journalists sitting down in front of us. For the record, Beowulf was on my top 10 that year of films. I loved Beowulf. I know it wasn't universally a love for a variety of reasons, but...

The love was not universal, and the late Roger Ebert, I think, did my favorite review of Beowulf in which he pointed out that it was funny and there was a level on which what Roger and I had set out to write was something akin to Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Jabberwocky

or those Terry Gilliam films that we loved. Sure. And I think the nature of the motion capture and stuff made that harder for people to see. Yeah.

But I thought it was a wonderful, silly, funny movie. But I do remember Roger and I going slowly mad in the interviews as we decided that we needed to start sneaking words into these interviews. Oh, yeah, this is a classic junket game. The junkie game was the word. And then we were doing too well at the words. How complex were the words? because you guys are two learned individuals.

I think you can go pretty ambitious. It actually got bad because it got to the point where the cameraman, who had now watched us give the same interview probably 200 times, bet us at some point in there, Roger had used the phrase, Beowulf's enormous naked wang to indicate one of the things that you'd, did not actually get to see in the film

because of the placement of camera and objects the naked scene did not happen. Was Wang the operative word? No, the cameraman said he would give us, he'd give $20 to the one who got that phrase, Beowulf's Inormous Naked Wang, into each of the junket interviews. And he was keeping count.

And it got to the point where, you know, we had to sort of have practically a referee decision on the point where we noticed that one of the interviewers was wrapping up. And Roger said desperately, but you haven't asked me about bear wolf's enormous naked wang. And it's like, no, we can't give you that one, Roger. You did not sneak that one naturally into a question. Now I know what I'm doing after this interview. I'm going on YouTube to look up old Beowulf interviews to see if I could find these mentions.

That's amazing. Well, yes, as you say, you're promoting this wonderful work based on your own material, of course, American Gods, which, yeah, since it started the screened, was it at South By? Did that were it? It was, it premiered at South By, it's since screened, I think, three times. It's been shown in London. There was a London premiere. There was a Paris premiere.

And upstate New York in Bard where I'm teaching a little. I'm a professor at Bard. Brian Fuller came up and we screened it for 900 people. and we sat and had a conversation about it and it was wonderful it's it's a fantastic show honestly i'm i count me among the camp that's very much impressed it's a i've seen the first four episodes and it's um unpredictable and audacious and beautiful and an amazing ensemble there's a lot to love in this show so congratulations i'm sure i can't wait to see what they're 10 in all is that right eight or 10 there's eight episodes in the first season um and the first season gets us probably a quarter of

the way through the book. So you've got some road to go. You've got a few years of this, hopefully, if the audience is there. If the audience is there, we know the critics are here. That doesn't necessarily mean that the audience is there, but I'm really hopeful. Does it feel like, I mean, you know, you've talked about this, I'm sure where, you know, we've talked about adaptations of your work, whether it's Coraline or Stardis, et cetera, when you're on press stores for these kinds of things. Do you still feel the same amount of connective tissue to this, to the material when it's filtered through the minds of Brian Fuller and Michael Green, do you feel it's a different beast now, or does it still feel like wholly yours? Or have you given up a piece of American

gods, you think, to someone else, others? It's only wholly yours when you're writing it before you've shown it to anybody. Then it's wholly yours. You're the only person who's read it. You're the only person who knows what this thing is. It's yours. Once it's published, once it's out in the world, once fans start doing fan art and fan fiction, once people start making up castings, once people turn up at conventions and cosplay events dressed as characters. It's not wholly yours anymore. It's now this shared thing. And you have to be willing to understand and appreciate that media are different and have different strengths and weaknesses and then work with that and play with that. Yeah. I think. You know, Coraline the book is not

Caroline the movie and the very first script that Henry Selleck gave did and sent me to read for Caroline I called him up and said Henry this is the book and you're making a film and you have to make this yours you were giving him the freedom you were giving him permission to yeah but and I was giving him the same permission that I would give myself if I were adapting a book or whatever you have to be willing to go this is not the thing yeah this is something else um a a book is not a a television series um a book is not a movie a television series is not a movie for something like american gods when i was writing it i was up against a page count i turned in a 200 page 200,000 word, 600 page book, 700 page book, and was told that I had a 500 page limit and could I lose 50,000 words and I managed to negotiate my editor losing maybe 20,000 words, which I wound up putting back 10 years ago.

yeah um the the great thing about having the tv series is every place that my head went every place i went oh i wish i could tell that story you can explore that tangent that side story whatever that gets told now yeah um we get one of my favorite characters in the book is laura shadow's wife And we only get to see her, because most of the book is from Shadow's point of view, when Shadow encounters her. So her arrival is pretty much always a surprise, and we don't know what's going on. Part of the joy of doing American Gods is that episode four is Laura's story. It's an episode that I couldn't have written.

that I couldn't have written in the novel. I didn't have the space and there wasn't actually a way in the structure of the novel to have gone and done that. But now we have that. So here you go, here's an hour of who she is, how she got that way, what happened, and the magic and the glory of that.

And it's my favorite episode and it's not in the book. I was gonna say that's the one I watched yesterday. It's so far my favorite. favorite episode. It's like it's American gods by way of like Sean of the Dead or it's it's very comedic and very absurd and and yet dramatic as well. It's it's kind of feels for me what your show is at the best, which is a very odd combination of tones that somehow coalesce into something great. A desperate interviewer yesterday actually wanting to know, not asking a rhetorical question, but just sort of going on. I really don't understand. She said, is it

it science fiction, is it fantasy? Just put it in a box for me, please. Or is it horror? And I had to say, well, when the novel came out, it won the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The British Fantasy Award is Best Fantasy Novel and the World Horror Award is Best Horror Novel. I can't give you, you know, your guess is as good as mine.

It is a bunch of stuff. There's more happy, sad, confused coming up after this break. The initial book came out of, you had moved to America by that point. It was an outgrowth of your experience. Is that fair to say? It is very fair to say. I moved to America in 1992, thinking that I understood America because I've been visiting America. I've been writing about America.

I've been watching American TV and films all my life. And I settled down in small town America outside Minneapolis and went, this is weird. This wasn't on the TV when you were growing up. You know, there was so much I had not understood and so much that just caught me by surprise, whether it was the simple nature of a winter that could kill you. you know I'm being English I figure I knew that freezing was a thing you know rain is now falling in white and fluffy form from the sky the puddles have gone hard and slippery that's cold I didn't realize that you know there's also like zero Fahrenheit which you know because when you step outside and take a deep breath all the hairs in your nose freeze. Then there's sort of minus 25, 30 down where when you take a deep breath, it's like being kicked in the lungs and you give a little involuntary cough of pain. You know, that kind of

world, the world of, I used to walk my dogs and when it was really cold in order to cheer myself up, I would boil a kettle, pour it into a thermos flask, walk outside, and throw the contents of the thermos flask into the air and if it's like you know minus 15 minus 20 the contents of the thermoslask becomes a fine misty snow on the air no liquid ever leaves and it's like this bizarre magic trick the water has to be really boiling for it to work and i'm going I am living in a science experiment. So that was weird. The American roadside attraction thing was weird.

The way that they would park a car on the ice of a frozen lake every December and then take bets on when the ice would melt enough of the car to go in. That, all of those things just left me baffled and delighted and trying to understand the country I was in as an immigrant. And trying to make sense of all of the other immigrant stories that I could find. And trying to figure out why it was, that stories that had had magic in them, in the old world, were now, when told over here devoid of magic.

I mean that quite literally. They're in Appalachia, they have the Jack stories, where the English immigrants to Appalachia told the stories they'd told back in England about Jack the Giant Killer and Jack and the Beanstalk and stuff only no magic. They'd taken the magic out.

And now the king was a guy in a big house down the road. And Jack would always solve things by his wits. But that was never anything fancy. And I would look at that. And I looked at the interviewers, the folklorists who would talk about the way that the gods had been left in the old world. And I had this sad vision of all of these old gods here in the new world, just trying to eke out some kind of living in a country that didn't love them anymore. And of new gods, of the things that take our attention now, the gods of media.

the gods of podcasts, the gods of mobile phone, the gods of the markets, all of the things and entities that have come up and take our love and take our time, competing with these old gods. I would think it also makes for, I mean, whether it's serendipity or happenstance or random luck or whatever, I mean, luck is a wrong word. to assign it, but the fact that you're telling this immigrant story in 2017 where this is very much part of our daily conversation and it's, you know, not the best of times to say the least for when I wrote the book, there were things that I regarded as absolutely and utterly non-controversial and innocuous. The idea that the Statue of Liberty meant what she said.

For me, was a fundamentally innocuous idea. The idea that, yes, America is a land of immigrants. People have come here. For 20,000 years, people have been coming here. And they have populated the land. They have treated the land in different ways. They have come here for a whole variety of reasons. Some came voluntarily.

Some came seeking their fortune. or religious freedom, some came in chains, some were sent here as prisoners, and all the different ways people came. The history of the things that America has done and Americans have done both good and bad to immigrants all seems so fundamentally part of the American story. and the American dream in the sense of the, you know, the things that America tells itself to keep itself sane and happy and comfortable and moving forward. Watching the things with American gods, it's now 2017, it's an immigration positive show.

It's a show in which just like the book, and again, as far as I was concerned, innocuously and not controversially, the racial makeup of the characters is all over the place because the racial makeup of this country is all over the place. People came from everywhere, and that's what we've been trying incredibly hard to reflect. we didn't think that was controversial when we set out to make it. I definitely didn't think it was controversial when I wrote the book. That we're seeing headlines now saying things like American Gods is the most political show of 2017. I think it has a lot more to do with the world going mad. Yeah. And the normalization of the people who, you know,

100 years, 120 years ago were fighting to keep out the Irish and who, you know, 130 years ago managed to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act to make sure that the Chinese weren't coming to California. There's a, you know, those are shameful little pieces of American history. Let now not be shameful. If we could, I'd love it, since we have some time, I'd love to also talk. talk a little bit about the development of this project because many of your projects have, you know, it's tough to mount a faithful adaptation in the right way and find the right venue. And clearly you found the right collaborators in the right venue finally for this one.

Were there other iterations of this that you were excited about that felt right at the time? Or did it always feel like the HBO, playtone, et cetera, was like something was off about those or others? You know, we could have made this there. What went wrong with that was basically simply that the executive at HBO who got American Gods, who loved it, who wanted to do it, moved on. And by the time we were handing in the first script, the people there. New mandates, new people, whatever. They hadn't bought it. They didn't understand it.

They didn't really like it. It baffled them. and we did two drafts and a polish and left and you know they gave it back to us in a sort of awkward kind of way yeah and I was incredibly relieved to have it back um and stars stepped up immediately Fremantle stepped up immediately I loved working with Playtone Tom Hanks's company unfortunately they have an exclusive deal with HBO and Cinemax and now the one place that we couldn't go was HBO and Cinemax. So going to Fremantle and it was very easy. Yeah. I mean, you know, people say, oh, this was a hard development process. I know, I've been through hard development processes. I have watched the 30 years of Sandman

things never getting made. That's a hard development process. This was really easy. We There was never an attempt to make it into a movie because when it came out, in the decade after it coming out, I would get phone calls from directors. They would be, for the most part, famous people whose work I knew, and they would say, I picked up American Gods in an airport, I read it, I can't get it out of my head, I think it would be an amazing movie, but it's so big and it's so weird, and it goes off all over, the place, how would you do this as a movie?

And I would say to them, I have absolutely no idea. I wrote it to be huge and all over the place. And once you've thrown out all of the all over the placeness of it, then it's not American gods anymore. And they go, yeah, and I'd never hear from them again. So that was easy. And when I wrote it, the idea of it being on television was kind of like it being projected onto the moon.

Right. The times have caught up. The media has cut up for this kind of content. Everything's changed. Yeah. Exactly. What's, you bring up Sandman. I'd be remiss not to ask, and I know you're asked about it probably every single day. But, like, you know, I followed this even in my career at MTV and talked to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, et cetera.

And I know he was passionate about it. Was there, again, an iteration of that that broke your heart that felt like they got it? They nailed it. And for whatever reason, it didn't, it wasn't able to be followed through. Do you have a favorite script or version of it? A favorite version of it so far. And there have been some really good Sandman scripts over the years and some not-so-good Sam-Man scripts over the years. Favorite script was Jack Thorne, who is a wonderful script writer who evolved it with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

But even, honestly, with that, what it wound up going up against was trying to turn something that is two and a half thousand pages long, into 120 minutes of film. And it's the first question is, what do you throw out? And the second is, and the answer is pretty much everything. And what do you keep in to make it film-shaped? And now it's always, you know, what I'm hoping for, honestly,

would be a TV Sandman. The new TV world, in the new TV world, the fact that we have, you know, 80 plus Sandman Stores and it's 2.5,000 pages long, and it has this enormous cast that covers the entirety of time and space, that's a feature, not a bug. Well, and also, I would, you know, I don't know if you'd agree with this, but TV now embrace. races complexity and ambiguity and complexity in a way that that film often doesn't. And it's, you know, it's a cliche to say, this is a golden age of TV, but it kind of feels like it is in terms of just the creative freedom and the fact that channels like whether it's SARS or FX or whatever are willing to kind of create quote-unquote niche programming that doesn't have to serve 30 million people every week gives so much more critical.

creative power, I feel like, to artists. When you don't have to be loved, when you don't have to be kind of liked by everyone, you can do stuff that is loved by some people. Exactly. And, you know, it does feel like a golden age in the same way that when I was writing Sandman, it felt like a golden age. Yep. There was this point where, you know, there were a handful of us.

Alan Moore had broken the way for us, and now there's me, and there's Grant Morrison, and there's Jamie Delano. and over Marvel you got you know Frank Miller and doing stuff and you had a wonderful little era of intelligent stuff being written for an audience who nobody had known was there right and in many cases an audience of people who hadn't known they liked that sort of thing or they hadn't known that they would read comics but now somebody was making comics for them The fact that women were reading comics, that was a whole new, exciting, wonderful thing. I would get large men in stained t-shirts coming up to me at comic conventions and pumping my hand and saying,

I got to thank you. You brought women into my store. And I would always have to repress the urge to say, you know, if you sweep it occasionally, they may come back. Do you feel, you alluded to this earlier, I'm curious about this, you know, I think of people like yourself or George R. Martin or J.K. Rowling and the expectations of audiences. And like I feel like, you know, George, for instance, has been like raked over the cold. They love him and they hate him because they, you can't write fast enough, et cetera. Have you felt that kind of weight of expectation? Do you, you know, as an artist, can you write in reaction or an expectation of an audience? It's probably, it's probably difficult to flush that of your brain. I am so lucky. For George, it must be like an axe in his head. You know, you wake up in the morning and you know that there are people out there going, I want another game of Thrones book, George.

And, you know, right-class George. And that's just his agent. You know those people are out there. For me, what's great is I have done so many things and they're so all over the place. My joy is not doing the same thing again. So when I do do the same thing again, everybody's like, oh, my God, he's doing something thing again. That's cool, cool.

And out in the world, you know, there is not a day that goes by that I don't go online and there are, you know, a handful of kids or grown up kids on Twitter going, do Coraline 2, do Caroline 2. I want to read Coraline 2. and then over here there are people waiting for you know is there ever going to be any more stardust and the when are we getting more sandman people and so forth and meanwhile i have a giant list of books to write and things to get done and some of them are actually sequels to things that we've seen before because there's more story or there's more stuff i want to say

or there's stuff that I want to say for which that kind of story is the perfect vehicle. And then there are things that I want to do that nobody's waiting for. And honestly, the stuff I like doing best is the stuff nobody is waiting for. If I am given a choice between, on the one hand, something that I know how to do, because I figured it all out, that I've already done once, that has. has a huge audience that was an enormous commercial success, that a publisher is standing there with an open checkbook going, if you give me another one of this, you can write your own check.

And on the other hand, something that I don't know how to do, that I've never done before, that may be a horrendous failure, and that nobody is waiting for, I will pretty much always pooter off after the thing I don't know how to do. I was going to say, no one can accuse you of chasing commercialism coming off of like, let me write a book of Nordic history, et cetera. That one's weird. I mean, in terms of unexpected commercial success, that one is still got me gloriously baffled. We're now, I think, at week 10, maybe week 11, in the upper reaches of the New York Times fiction bestseller list,

sometimes it'll drop down to number three and then it creeps back up to number two and then it drops down to number four and goes back up to number three. And that was my book I've described to people over the years as my knitting. You know, it was a book that I was, I had the lunch where I was asked to do it in 2008.

I started work on it in about 2011, 2012, I, every now and then, just between things. When I was writing Sandman Overture, between scripts, I write a Norse myth, and now I'm working on Good Omen's the TV series, and between scripts, I'll write a Norse myth. And it was my knitting, and I was so proud of it, and I handed it in, and I thought,

this is great, it'll sell like a short story collection or whatever, but it'll probably sell for a long time time because schools will like it and people will buy it. But I was proud of it. It comes out. It goes to number one. It stays at number one. It's at number one all over the world.

It's a phenomenon. Even now, you can scent that there are publishers all over the world going, will you write us a book of Greek mythology? Will you write us a book of Roman mythology? And writers everywhere going, are you sure this is a way to make money? And I'm going, yes, it worked for gaming. And I'm going, I don't know that it's going to work twice. It might not be the lesson.

This is Happy Sack and Fused. We'll be right back after this. Obviously, you've ridden for virtually every conceivable medium. Are they different skill sets? Is it sculpting versus painting? Is it all the same? When you attack a project, are you using different muscles, you think? I think I'm lucky because I think, at the end of the day, I am not a novelist.

I know some novelists, and what they do is they write novels, and I'm not a screenwriter. And I know some amazing screenwriters and what they do and what they think and what they dream and what they breathe a script. I'm a storyteller, and I'm a storyteller who enjoys. the freedom to go and do things in different media. And so for me, and I'm also a storyteller who is very aware that the way that you learn how to do something is you do it and fail and then you do it again and, you know, you fail differently. Do you have that internal barometer at this point in your career?

Or like, you know, you're in rarefied air, obviously, as a writer that people are inclined to love your work. They're ready to receive it with love. Can you, I would think the danger is kind of like buying that narrative and not being self-critical. Do you know when you've written something that that doesn't feel like it's up to your standards? Do you trust others at this point? Do you look to others for their input? No, that is a scary one. there is it's the knowledge that when I was young if I wrote a short story for an editor and I handed it in and they didn't publish it and they said you know no it's not good enough or whatever I could oh well that was good I learned something now if I write a short story and I sent it to an anthology or whatever they will publish it because it means they get to put my name on the front which means that what I need are

friends who are writers, who in many cases I've known for 30 years or more, who will be rude. They knew you when you were mortal before you could do no wrong. They know that I can do wrong and that I'm very, very mortal. And, you know, the saddest thing is my John M. Ford, Mike Ford, who was my best beta reader died a few years ago. and it was like, ah, and I have lots of friends who will read and who will say, this worked for me, this didn't work for me, and you take it all on board and you listen. And also my editors are terrific.

I have really good editors who've been working with me for a very long time and who I listen to. Are you, you know, I know like a big moment just for like the kid within you was getting a chance to write for Doctor Who. Oh, yes, of course. Is there something, I mean, do you still enjoy that kind of like playing in someone else's sandbox a little bit, whether it's writing a superhero for DC or Marvel or a dog or Who, or, you know, Star Trek asked you to do something, whatever? Is that something that you find is, you know, just tickles your creative juices still?

Is it still interesting? Yeah, it still does. And some of it is just that the ability to indulge your inner seven-year-old. Righting an episode of Doctor Who, you know, the first time I got to write interior TARDIS and write what the doctor was doing, it felt like I was God. My inner seven-year-old was going, this is it. I'm doing my own fan fiction. I'm making the stuff that was canon in my head about the doctor's relationship with the TARDIS. the stuff I've thought since I was a kid where I would puzzle,

why the TARDIS would always drop him into these exciting places, I'm going to make that a thing, and it's going to be on the screen, and it's going to be real. And that was so exciting. I remember the first time I wrote Dialogue for Batman. And, you know, I was, it was 19, late 1987, and it was a book called Black Orchid, and I brought Batman on. And I was, I don't remember being as happy as just sitting in a room on my own in front of a screen as I was writing my first Batman dialogue. Yeah. Put putting your, you know, your fan boy hat and your writer hat on, I assume you, you know, consume the same kind of content I do in terms of films. It's watching all the Marvel and DC adaptations. If they brought you in, maybe they have, I don't even know, as a consultant or whatever, is there advice that you would give in terms of there have been hits and misses, certainly? Marvel maybe has a better track record than DC, etc. I'm just curious about your viewpoint on sort of how superheroes have taken over the landscape of film and,

My viewpoint is that, and it's the thing that I say to would-be makers of films, the closer the film is to the sort of platonic ideal of the comic in people's heads, the more successful it is artistically and very often commercially. the point where they go I know the comic says this but let's do this is very often the point

where it all breaks it's the point where they go well yeah of course Superman flies in the comics but that's kind of hokey so let's just lose the cloak which is kind of stupid

and give him a supercar and he just drives around really fast and people love the fast and the fury movies it'll be like that and you just want to go no don't do it there's a reason why it's worked for 75 years there are certain tenants people there is a thing that people love and I think there's also a a lightness that I'm hoping that the DC comic stuff is getting back to when it when it when it when it when it it's not a matter of taking itself too seriously but there was it's like the phrase that we used to use in the late 80s talking about comics was

grim and gritty and saying you know grim and gritty works for a little bit and then everybody is done with grim and gritty right and it's probably time and you need that it swings the pendulum will always swing is and you're uh i mean speaking of adaptations you're working on good omens correct this is finally coming to television soon I am. It's, I've written the scripts, which is six hours of, six full hours of telly, written by me. Adapted from the novel by me and Terry Pratchett. Terry and I had a kind of deal that we wouldn't do anything with good omens that wasn't done together.

And which meant that for years, we were looking for a writer. to do the TV series. And we talked to a lot of people. Most didn't do it because they said it was too intimidating and stuff like that. And as Terry started leaving us, he sent me his last request, which was, you know, he said, I want you to do it. Nobody else loves the old girl like you do, and I do. I can't do this and you have to do this.

And I got very grumpy because it's like, you know, I have a lot of things to write, Terry. And now you've just said what I'm doing for the next two years. And but you don't argue with a last request. Has this process kind of, I'm sure, Terry is very much on your mind throughout writing each and every episode. It was, I, I, I, I. It worked two different ways. Whenever I would get stuck, I would get so frustrated and upset that Terry was no longer at the end of a telephone. Because I knew that if I got stuck and he was there, I could have just called him up.

And he would have gone, ah, grasshopper. The problem is in the way that you approach the problem. And I would have said, yeah, don't give me that, Terry. just what are we doing here and we would have sorted it out and then whenever i did anything really clever and i'd figured something out on my own or i i remember trying to work out how the last episode was going to go because if we made a tv series or that in which the last episode was the was the end of the book, you would have had essentially an hour of going around and saying goodbye.

And I've seen a few things that did that, and they weren't very interesting. So I needed a plot that would tick to the last second. And I came up with one, and I was so pleased. And all I wanted to do was phone Terry and say, I just, I did this, aren't I clever? Tell me I'm clever. and have him go, and we could also do this, as he would have done,

and he wasn't there. This is, for Amazon, is there a timetable for when we might see this? It's actually, it was commissioned by the BBC in England. I handed in the scripts. The BBC went, We love this,

but we can't afford it. We are going to go and look for a partner. And Amazon, When the BBC said, would you like to be our partner, they said, we have an even better idea. Would you like to make it for us? We will give you enough money to make it properly. And the BBC said, this is more money than we have ever seen in one place. And Nelson said, yes, this is, we are in business.

Right now, we are looking for a director and talking to a director. And when we get a director nailed, we'll then nail in the rest of the production schedule, and then I would be able to answer your question, when will we see it? But you're in a good place. If the scripts are, you're happy with where the scripts are, et cetera, now it's finding the right partner.

Absolutely. Do you write every single day? I like to write every single day. Is it work to you to carve out that time, or is that something you look forward to finding carving out that's that's the best bit um the the writing bit is the bit where i go off and i'm on my own and it feels like i'm playing everything else feels like work doing press junkets feels like work yeah um doing you know talking to agents having conference calls about um marketing

or whatever whatever yes or all of that stuff feels like work And then there's the making stuff up and that feels like playing and the hardest part of that is it's actually much too easy for me to feel guilty about not doing the quote unquote work and to write less because I have people sending me emails and needing to know things and organizing stuff so I might go off and I do that and I forget that. And I forget that it's actually the play that makes everything happen. Is it feel similar to when you first started writing as a kid? Does it feel like the same creative process? Or have you honed it in a way where it's more efficient or workman-like or whatever? Does it still feel as free and loose or whatever it was when it started? It feels always simultaneously as fun, as trivial and as terrifying as it always did.

I fun because you're making stuff up and that's the best thing in the world. Trivial because it's very hard to convince yourself that, or myself anyway, that making stuff up is a fit occupation for a own man and terrifying because it's always you and a blank screen or a blank sheet of paper and the next word doesn't exist until you make it up and write it down and the next thing that happens doesn't exist until you make it up and write it down and sometimes you'll get stuck and then you have to either solve why you're stuck and fix that or you have to write something else because the alternative is you sit there and stare in a space for weeks and then come back to it whatever but you that's the process of making stuff up yeah i it is

frustrating sometimes. I would love to have a really, really realistic and articulate robot double who I could send out to do the junk hits and talk to publishers and talk to the TV people and show up and do signings. I mean, you know, all of that kind of stuff. He'd be great. He could go and do that stuff and I could stay home and just play with the baby and make stuff up. Well, I won't keep you away from your baby and your writing any longer. You're too talented to deny the world your great abilities for too long. Congratulations on American Gods. It's a great achievement from you and a great creative team.

Again, we should give props to the great Brian Fuller and Michael Green in that cast, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, Brian and Michael have taken something that was impossible to adapt and adapted it with Panash, with glory. and with delight and actually talking about me and Terry what I love is they do phone me when they get stuck and the phone will ring

and it will be Michael or it will be Brian and they'll go we're here in the plot but what do we do and how do we get out of this? And I would go oh well that's kind of easy you do this and there how do you know and I'm like well I've lived with these characters now for 20 years

which is really nice. They're amazing. The cast is astonishing. Ricky seems a little insane. When I interviewed you guys at Comic-Con, he put me in an embrace for the entirety. I don't remember this in our 20-minute interview. He literally was sitting on my lap for 20 minutes,

and I felt like we had a marriage of beauty. He did. Yeah, it was a beautiful thing. Yes. I actually thought the two of you, We're probably going to get married after that. He hasn't called since. I don't know.

If you could put it a good word. I mean, I'd have to talk to my wife. But it's 2017. Let's be open to these things. It's 2017 and Ricky is very beautiful. The, the, it is, I love the difference between our cast now and our cast at Comic-Con. Because our cast at Comic-Con, well, like, nobody knows who we are really. Or maybe they, if we're famous, we're famous for doing.

other things and we are um you know nobody really knows anything about our show and now they're all together in a new york hotel as journalists one by one sit down and say oh my god you're amazing and the show is amazing and you're wonderful and actors love to be told that they're wonderful um and their performances are wonderful they they feed on this they you know, genuine adulation is to them as meat and drink and sweet music. And so now they have blossomed. This is the good time, yeah. They are the happiest of actors.

As they should be. And they deserve it. I was going to say, yeah. And they worked really long, really hard. And also, actually, you don't get to say this very often. I want to say something. Fremantle and stars have also been fantastic. fantastic. Fremantle is the studio. Stars is the network. People who don't know how to watch

this, you can either watch it on Stars on cable, or there's a fantastic Stars app that you can download, or a Star's add-on to Amazon Prime. All of these ways are great for watching things. They had confidence in us, and which meant that. that when there were episodes that went wrong, when we looked at what we'd done, and when some of this stuff is absolutely fantastic, and some of this stuff looks wrong or feels wrong, or the tone is wrong, or just doesn't quite work.

In the world of television, normally what people say is, yeah, that happens, it's telly. Stars and Fremantle said go do reshoots and the reshoots happened and they took it from being very good to being great. That feeling that we actually were given the freedom to take it from very good to great is the thing that makes me so happy. show as audacious as this and you'll know what I'm talking about after you see the first episode just that you're the goddess of love the my gosh there's it Wilkis the queen of Sheba there are some scenes involving her that will stick with you for some time it's amazing amazing stuff Neil it's been a great pleasure to get to know you today congratulations in the show and

hopefully we can chat again on future seasons as this continues I would love that and so ends another edition of happy sad confused remember to review rate and subscribe to this show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a big podcast person. I'm Daisy Ridley, and I definitely wasn't pressure to do this by Josh. This episode of Happy, Sad, Confused, was produced by Michael Catano, Mooka Mohan, and Kasha Mihailovich for the MTV Podcast Network, with additional engineering by Little Everywhere.

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