The protagonist isn’t even born until the second chapter, and the plot resolves not so much in a traditional climax as in a series of near misses. The novel is both spare, only 50,000 words or so, and leisurely. The coach in which the princes travel was built to look like a Hummer, for example, and the princes’ outfits owe less to traditional courtly raiment than to Clint Eastwood’s getup in “A Fistful of Dollars.” Much of the movie was filmed on location in Scotland and Iceland, and it makes considerably less use of computer-generated effects than many movies of this sort. He added that he deliberately injected the Stormhold scenes with contemporary touches. You’re not wearing a costume, you’re wearing clothes.”‘ “I kept telling everyone: ‘Just play it normal. “Basically, I love fantasy novels, but I wanted to make a non-fantasy fantasy movie,” Vaughn said. The idea, in a nutshell, was to make the fantastical scenes seem in some ways more realistic than the Victorian ones. Vaughn had directed only one other movie, “Layer Cake,” and is best known for producing Guy Ritchie’s heist films, “Snatch” and “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.” Some of Ritchie’s more recent movies, made without Vaughn, suggest that the producer’s contributions may have consisted of a good deal more than writing checks, but Gaiman settled on Vaughn mostly just because he found him trustworthy. Goldman, on the other hand, had never written a movie before and is best known for an “X Files” guidebook and as the host of a British television series investigating the paranormal. “The artist gets to be the cameraman and the actors.” Gaiman has also made a real movie, “A Short Film About John Bolton,” which is a documentary about the other John Bolton: the fantasy artist, not the former U.S. “What I do is like being the screenwriter, director and editor,” he explained. His usual way of working – plotting a graphic novel frame by frame and then turning his instructions over to an artist – is as close, he has said, as you can get to moviemaking without actually making a movie. In many ways Goldman and Vaughn were unlikely choices for the movie – which stars Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro – especially considering that Gaiman is famously fussy about turning his work into film. “Stardust,” in other words, was intended to be pre-Tolkien, a fantasy novel that didn’t read like one, and the movie’s creative team – the director, Matthew Vaughn, and the screenwriter, Jane Goldman – have attempted much the same thing: a fantasy film that can be watched not just by the “Lord of the Rings” crowd, or even by Gaiman’s worshipful following, but also by people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a fantasy film. But by the early ’70s ‘Lord of the Rings’ was a cult, and it spawned a whole genre, with genre expectations.” Then in the middle of the century you get Tolkien, who at first wasn’t pigeonholed as a fantasy writer, either. There was no sense that fantasy was in any way less than respectable. In this country you had someone like James Branch Cabell, who was a very distinguished figure. Hope Mirrlees, for example, was a friend of Virginia Woolf and T.S. “People who wrote fantasy were just novelists. “In the first half of the century there was no genre distinction,” he said. Gaiman composed it in longhand, using a fountain pen and a leather-covered notebook, he said in New York recently, and the result was that he eliminated “a lot of computery bloat.” His aim was to evoke the manner of early-20th-century writers like Lord Dunsany and Hope Mirrlees, who wrote fantasy stories of a sort that was sometimes called “faerie.” Set in two parallel worlds, a quaint Victorian village named Wall and the fantastical kingdom of Stormhold, and with a plot that involves both a witch and a posse of murderous princes chasing after a fallen meteorite that is really a young woman, “Stardust” is also written in a consciously old-fashioned manner. “Stardust (Being a Romance Within the Realm of Faerie)” was subsequently reissued as a hardback and trade paperback, and in 1999 was published in a text-only version, without the Vess illustrations. To begin with, though it was originally published in four installments by DC Comics in 1997, “Stardust” was never a comic book series with panels and dialogue, like, say, Gaiman’s famous “Sandman.” It’s a prose novel with Arthur Rackham-like illustrations by Charles Vess, and came out in a comics format only because traditional book publishers didn’t want to spring for so much color printing. 10, is a bit of an anomaly among the works that have made him a legend in the comics world. Neil Gaiman’s novel “Stardust,” the source for the new movie of the same name that opens Aug.
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