JOSH HOROWITZ: Neil,
what’s your attitude right now
in terms of, like,
fidelity to your work?
I mean, we were just— Ian was just
talking about this a little bit.
Are you open to sort of going
wherever the story dictates
in the medium or what?
NEIL GAIMAN: It’s a weird
kind of balancing act
because 95 percent
of the time they will say,
“We want to do this,”
or “We’re doing this,”
and I will go, “That’s brilliant,
that’s wonderful,
I can’t wait to see it,”
and 5 percent of the time I will go,
“No, and this is why,”
and they will go,
“Oh, okay.”
And so it’s—
that’s pretty much—
BRYAN FULLER: Yeah, yeah.
There was only one time
where you said,
“If that happens, I will jump
in front of a train.”
And then we didn’t do that!
JOSH: Can you say what that was?
BRYAN: You have to watch the show!
NEIL: You have to watch the show.
One of the things I loved,
you know, that Bryan—
I knew that I wanted to work with Bryan
and Michael was that
when I said to them,
“I have one thing which is huge,
which is we do not screw with the racial
makeup of the people in the book.
I wrote it to be very representative
and we keep that.”
And they have. The glory
right now of American Gods
is that all of of the things
that made it really hard to make,
either as film or TV five years ago,
ten years ago, fifteen years ago,
are all things that now
make it great and wonderful.
When we first started thinking
about maybe making it as TV,
the idea of doing something
like Bilquis’s scenes
or the more sexual stuff
or the more out-there stuff.
It was, like, well do we lose that?
What happens? Now—
JOSH: All that stuff on Starz,
I mean, will—
NEIL: Now Starz is just—
they want to make the thing
that we made,
and these guys are worse
than I am so it’s brilliant.
