enry Selick--the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas--takes on his first live-action feature film with the zany Monkeybone, starring Brendan Fraser as a cartoonist who encounters his darkest creations after falling into a coma. Selick brings his signature wild style to Monkeybone, which is based on the graphic novel Dark Town, written by Kaja Blackley and illustrated by Vanessa Chong. Sam Hamm (Batman) wrote the script.
Selick combines live action, computer graphics and stop-motion animation of the kind seen in Nightmare and Selick's James and the Giant Peach. But he also gets a chance to work with real actors this time, including Bridget Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Kattan and David Foley.
Selick took a minute to talk with Science Fiction Weekly recently about the film, which opened Feb. 23.
This is your first live-action feature film.
Selick: I've done bit of live action before. This is live action with effects. It's about a cartoonist on the verge of great success, who's in an accident, falls into a coma and basically enters this limbo world called Downtown, the place where all coma victim spirits reside. In this world, he faces his own cartoon creation, who is his nemesis and his ally, called Monkeybone. He finds he has a certain amount of time to get back to his wife before the plug is pulled on his body, and the monkey has plans of his own to steal the body. It gets more bizarre.
You combine different effects in the film.
Selick: Monkeybone, when he is alive, is a 3-D puppet, all done in stop motion like Nightmare and James, and it really looks great. It doesn't have that computer feel, and it's not drawn like Roger Rabbit. It's difficult to do, but it has a really wonderful, tactile element to it. The interaction with other characters also came out very well. ... [Stop-motion animation is] really, really tough, but it's a comfortable world for me. I worked with the same group of people [as on Nightmare], and it was fantastic. I love to do stop-motion animation.
You've changed the tone of the piece, from the comic's dark tone to one that's more funny.
Selick: There's a very obscure comic book called Dark Town by Kaja Blackley. Many things have changed, but the premise is the same. In the comic, he was a puppeteer who gets trapped in a world with puppets, and has X number of hours to get back to his body. ... It never really had much humor in it. I would characterize it as dark comedy now. It's very comedic at times, and even at its most serious, it still has comic undertones.
What attracted you to the story?
Selick: I think I've always been interested in other worlds that coexist with ours ...and the original comic had a really fantastic style and look to it, by Vanessa Chong, the illustrator. And it was also very clean and simple. It's become more complex, and her work doesn't really remain. But graphically, it was pure. It seemed that it was in the creator's own mind of kind of jagged puppets. I also felt that the story premise--you look at someone in a coma, you don't think of their spirit having a consciousness, and probably think you're doing them a favor by pulling the plug. ... But the story is that the spirit is very much alive and desperately trying to get back into the body.
I interviewed a coma victim who was in a coma for a year. She felt very much that her spirit was alive and stuck between life and death, that her feet were nailed to the ground. It was very convincing. I think that there's very much going on when people are in a coma, that life exists. ... It just kind of gave me a sense of faith that we really could create this life of the inner mind that, for her, really existed. For her, she talked with her dead grandfather. She interacted with long-dead movie stars she'd never been exposed to in her life. ... It was an intense, interesting conversation. It convinced me that, for this young woman, another plane existed. It gave us strength to be very inventive. ... By turning [the hero] into a cartoonist with a troubled past, and with this outrageous character of Monkeybone, it led to the opportunity for comedy: His own creation turns on him. Monkeybone represents his libido and his id.
How does Monkeybone differ from Nightmare?
Selick: There are similarities. The world we go to, Downtown--it's not Halloweentown, but it is a run-down carnival with perpetual nighttime. Instead of all animated creatures, there are a lot of people in costumes, but with extreme designs. There is a similarity in the look of the two films [as there will be with] probably anything I do that's set in an imaginary world. ... The nightmares we see are very different, from funny and goofy to very creepy. They're shot in black and white, and are simply conceived, but have a lot of power. They're very different from what you may have seen in work previously.
People have made comparisons between Monkeybone and Cool World or Beetlejuice. What do you think of those comparisons?
Selick: It's how movies get sold in the first place, that it's a mix of this and a mix of that. I never saw Cool World; I know the premise, but I can't comment on comparisons. ... Certainly, there are similarities with Beetlejuice, in terms of the waiting room scene, before you ... go to heaven or hell. ... But instead of a waiting room, we have an entire world that coma spirits hang out in, riding amusement park rides, drinking themselves silly in a coma bar. It deals with the afterlife and how spirits in the afterlife might affect our lives. So I'd say it's definitely a distant cousin to a film like Beetlejuice, which I thought was a great movie, which didn't always work, but when it did, it worked brilliantly.
You originally had Ben Stiller in mind for the Brendan Fraser role.
Selick: We spoke with Ben Stiller early on. Brendan was someone we were always interested in. It was just a case of, we couldn't get our schedules to work. ... We really needed to move forward.
What other projects are you working on? You're adapting a Neil Gaiman book?
Selick: Neil Gaiman has a fantastic book called Coraline. ... This is a simpler tale. I want to do something less complex. The three movies I've directed have all been very complicated, the last in particular in terms of story. [Coraline] is a modern-day Alice Through the Looking-Glass. It's about a girl, 10 or 12 years old, living with her parents in a duplex, a house that's split down the middle. Above her lives a creepy old man with a circus of rodents ... and below, two old ladies who were once stars of the theater. ... Through a locked door she's never supposed to open ... she finds a mirror image of her own life, except in that world, her formerly disinterested parents fawn over her. ... The man above is a magician; the ladies downstairs can shed their old-lady costumes and become young beautiful performers. This mirror world at first seems to be a great improvement ... but it turns out to be ultimately a terrible trap, and she has to not only escape from the trap, but also rescue her parents and other children who have been trapped in there. It's a beautiful, elegant story. My main job is not to mess it up and keep it as close to the original, because it's so beautifully written.
Will this also be a live-action film?
Selick: Primarily live action. Again, the effects might involve animation. I will write the first draft and may direct. ... I'm going to try to get first draft done before the [impending writers'] strike, so we can at least go out and do design work and get actors. ... I'm doing it for Bill Mechanic, the former head of Fox, and his Pandemonium production company.
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