Neil Gaiman is nearly as talkative as he is busy—and he's very, very busy. The talented British writer—whose works range from books to comics, graphic novels to screenplays—has produced the upcoming film version of Stardust, written the forthcoming Beowulf, intends to direct Death, just had DreamWorks option the long-dormant Interworld and is waiting to see how director Henry Selick's stop-motion-animated take on Coraline comes together.

SCI FI Weekly recently sat down with Gaiman at a New York City hotel to talk about Stardust, a playful fairy tale directed by Matthew Vaughn and featuring Claire Danes and Charlie Cox as the star-crossed leads, with supporting turns from Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Ricky Gervais, among others. The film opens Aug. 10.Since you can speak firsthand about this issue on several levels, just how tricky is adapting a novel into a film?

Gaiman: I think all adaptations are tricky, because whenever something moves from one medium to another it changes, and it has to change. By definition it is changed. It was that I learned really early, and I was lucky to learn it as early as I did. I would have been about 26 years old, and my very first graphic novel, a book called Violent Cases, had just come out. And it was adapted for the stage. They had a very nice director and a very nice actor, and I went to see it on the first night. I'm sitting there and they have done the most faithful adaptation possible, and I'm sitting there mouthing along every line. And it didn't work. Things that were dramatic high points on the page were dead on the stage. Things that were throwaways on the page became huge, dramatically important moments. Something that on the page was about the nature of violence and memory and the way that contrasts could be made between this adult remembering being 3 years old and going to birthday parties ...

The high point of the book is a sequence where he's at a birthday party and he's wandered away and has been told about an Al Capone gangland massacre, which is simultaneously occurring on a page in his memory, and you're cutting from a panel of kids playing musical chairs to these guys tied to chairs and having their heads smashed in with baseball bats. It's a great moment. And on stage it was just something somebody said, whereas moments that were sort of toss-offs became hugely important moments of theatrical magic. The end result was [a play that was] very, very soft-centered, that, despite being completely faithful, was nothing like the thing that I'd made.Which brings you, years later, to Stardust. ...

Gaiman: That was the lesson that I learned at that point, which was that you can sometimes be a lot more faithful by changing things, that media are different, that you do not transliterate, you translate. So the toughest nut to crack for something like Stardust, for example, in changing it into a film ... there are a few things.

There were the problems that we knew we had going in, because they were the problems that I had in 1998, 1999, when Miramax had the option on it briefly and I got to do a treatment, and suddenly I came face to face with these things for the first time. The biggest one was if you are completely faithful to the pacing of the book, the hero won't be born for the first 15 or 20 minutes, and he's not going to meet the heroine until almost three-quarters of the way through the movie. That's a problem. And also, there are different pleasures in prose and film, by definition.

Something that I did, that I took enormous joy in doing and that I think is very pleasurable for readers or, if one can say this without sounding patronizing, the right kind of reader, is the way that when we get to the last few chapters the reader has a bird's-eye view of the action and knows more about what's going on than any of the characters down at ground level, and there comes a point toward the end of the book where characters are missing each other, things that a character has done earlier wind up dooming them later, and they go past each other, sometimes without any knowledge of quite what's happened. And we get to the final chapter, and we know just how close our hero and heroine came to not surviving the book, but they don't, which is kind of fun.So that's a reader pleasure, something that couldn't be done in a film, right?

Gaiman: It wouldn't be a pleasure in a film. If you're sitting there in the audience, having sat through 85 minutes and now everybody is missing each other and the witch [Pfeiffer] is too old and she's doomed herself by these actions back there and Sextmus [Adam Buxton] winds up trying to kill her and getting killed by her, but never knows who she is and what she's done, it would not be very satisfying in a film. So there's this point where you go, "We need all of them in a room." So you're constrained. I read Stardust as a book on CD and MP3, and it's 10 1/2 hours, and it's not a long book, but if you actually adapted that, you'd have 10 hours of stuff. How do we take that and make it filmic? So that really was the biggest challenge in the whole thing, trying to figure out ways to make something work as a film. Sometimes it's doable, and sometimes I have no idea how you do it.What did Matt Vaughn bring to the table as a director?

Gaiman: At the time I wrote that treatment for Miramax, I realized that I didn't want to write a script until I know who's directing it, because Julie Taymor's Stardust would not be Tim Burton's Stardust. Quentin Tarantino's Stardust would not be Peter Weir's Stardust. They could all be good, but they'd all be such different movies in terms of what elements somebody focused on.

When I got the option back, I spent about five years saying no to directors and to starlets. You can't say starlets anymore. It's probably sexist and demeaning. Young, attractive, lady star actors—there we go—that wanted it as a vehicle for themselves. And there were directors who had read it and loved it. And I said no to a lot of them, mostly because none of the directors particularly inspired me and I didn't want it to be a vehicle seemed wrong for this. I could see everything getting skewed even by the right person in the role, when they think that it's all about them, because it has to be an ensemble piece. That was hugely important. Matthew [at left] and I had talked about it briefly when we worked together briefly in 2002. Claudia, his wife, had been very pregnant, and a fireplace had fallen on her foot, a marble fireplace, breaking her foot. When you're very pregnant with a broken foot you don't do much walking. You do a lot of reading, and I'd given her a copy of Stardust. She'd picked it up and read it and loved it and made Matthew read it. And he loved it. He said to me, "This would make a great movie. Who do you like to direct it?" I said, "Terry Gilliam," and we had lunch with Terry. But Terry said, "Look, I've just come off this Brothers Grimm thing. I'm not doing another fairy story for all the tea in China."And Gilliam has been trying to make a film version your story Good Omens. ...

Gaiman: Terry has wanted to make Good Omens since 1991, and, bless him, I hope one day someone will give him $70 million and he'll make it. He's such a wonderful man, and I don't know why Hollywood is terrified of him, because they really are, and he's so brilliant.

Anyway, Terry said no, and Matt at that point was a producer. He'd done Lock, Stock. He'd done Snatch. But he did a few things when we were working together which were very odd, in that by the end of it I'd trusted him utterly, and I'd watched him stick to his word. We'd done a handshake deal on some stuff, and his people he was working with started pressuring him to change the deal and to redefine things at a point where I was in a position of no strength at all. And he could have done it, or maybe he couldn't really have done it, but everything would have fallen apart. And he didn't know that. But they were really pushing him, and he started wavering. Then he came back after lunch and he said, "You know, we made a deal and we'd shook hands. I'm sticking to the deal. I stick to my word."

That, although he probably didn't know it at the time, really got him Stardust four or five years later, because I went, "Oh my gosh, I can actually trust him. He says he'll do things and he'll do them. That's cool. That's not like anyone I have ever met in Hollywood before." They lie automatically. They lie without thinking. They lie in the way some people breathe. Here was somebody who stuck to his word. So Matt accidentally became a director. He had this script for Layer Cake which they had prepared for Guy Ritchie, and Guy wasn't going to do it now. I spoke to Matt at one point and he was interviewing directors, and then one day he said, "Oh, f--k it," and he did it himself. Then he went off to direct an X-Men movie, and for various reasons he was not comfortable with X-Men, with the script or the budget or really with anything, and he came home.

A few days after he'd come home, I got a phone call from him saying, "I want to direct Stardust." We talked for several hours about what he had in mind, what he wanted this thing to be. And I thought, "I'm really comfortable with Matt doing it, but the stuff he's really comfortable with is all the action." He was comfortable with the adventure, with the action, but completely uncomfortable with the romance and the girlie bits. I thought, "I have to find him a co-writer, and I have to find him a writer who will be the yin to his yang or whatever."And you paired him with Jane Goldman?

Gaiman: I'd been a fan of Jane Goldman's forever, of her journalism, of her nonfiction books for teenagers, of her X-Files companion, which was really about weird phenomena, and of her as a novelist. I loved the way she writes, and I thought her sense of humor could mesh with Matt's. Stardust was the only book of mine she'd never read. She read it, and we talked about it for a while, and she really got it. I said, "Would you like to write the screenplay?" And she said yes. She went off to meet Matthew, they really did hit it off, and the rest is history. Together they wrote that script. Later, I flew out and Jane and I acted the script out with Matthew watching. We made a lot of changes, and then once we finished that, with the exception of occasional changes for budget, that was pretty much what they wound up shooting.

We're going to run out of time, so let's talk briefly about a few of your other projects. You wrote the script for Beowulf, which Robert Zemeckis is directing as a motion-capture animated film. How is Beowulf coming together?

Gaiman: The weird thing about Beowulf [poster at right] is that the script was written in 1997, rewritten for the mo-cap, smaller version thing, but with more budget, in 2005, in early 2005. And it was shot in late 2005 and has spent the last 18 months in computers.How about Coraline?

Gaiman: That's beautiful. It's that amazing thing where it's Henry Selick doing stop-motion. Henry is a great director. I'm one of the few people who loved Monkeybone. I think it's a mess, but I think it's a mess with more ideas in it than ... most movies only have one idea, and this one was a mess because it's got 100 ideas. But Henry is a genius when it's stop-motion. Nobody else can do that. The lovely thing about Coraline is that it's got life. The bits that I have seen that are animated are so expressive. Dakota Fanning is great. Teri Hatcher is great, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I sort of was very cynical when they said, "Oh, we have got Teri Hatcher." But she's great. John Hodgman, Jennifer Saunders, they're great. It's so cool. And the songs are by They Might Be Giants.You're about to make your directing debut with Death. Are you directing that because, of all your works, that's the one that would hurt more than any of them if botched?

Gaiman: I'm not sure about more than any of them, but more than most. Death is so tonal. I'm so proud of The High Cost of Living, the graphic novel that it's based on, that I know that most of what works about Death is tone of voice and the way that it's told. If somebody made a bad Neverwhere movie I can go, "Well, there's the novel. It's decent." If somebody made Death and they screwed it up, it would hurt. She's like my kid. If anyone's going to screw it up I'd rather it were me. We have a budget. The biggest problem that Death has had is, because it's got Sandman characters, it all has to be somewhere under the giant Warner Brothers umbrella. So we started out at Warner Brothers, moved to New Line, went from New Line to Warner Independent Pictures, and we have now moved to Picturehouse. It's all Time Warner, but it's weird because you're, like, dancing from one tentacle to the other of the corporate octopus. So I believe right now that Picturehouse is closing their version of the deal with Warner Brothers and with New Line.