Director Henry Selick has ample experience adapting lustrous visions to film, whether it's Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" or Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach." However, his latest challenge -- to adapt popular comics writer Neil Gaiman's children's book "Coraline" as 3D, stop-motion feature -- required him to relearn his process and develop a new way of working.
"I met Neil and got the pages -- it wasn't even a published book yet -- and I saw it as a movie immediately," Selick told MTV News. "Now, getting here from there - that's been a wild ride."
When Selick and Gaiman began collaborating on a screenplay for "Coraline," the story of a young girl who finds a doorway to a world with an alternate version of her own family that seems perfect at first but grows more sinister, communication occurred regularly -- but as Selick learned, that didn't produce the most desirable results.
"We figured out how best to work at the beginning," the director said. "When I worked on the first draft of the screenplay, I was conferring with Neil all the time and the screenplay was awful. It was too close to the book -- it wasn’t a movie."
Selick said Gaiman's compelling vision for the story kept him too focused on "Coraline" as a book, but the need to tailor their screenplay to film required him to take a step back.
"I learned to go off, do a bunch of stuff on my own and then show it to Neil," Selick explained. "So, all along the process, Neil has been shown screenplays, character designs and bits of the film, and finally I showed him the completed film about three weeks ago when he came to the studio."
That choice allowed Selick to better exercise his tested cinematic vision and create a "Coraline" script that could establish itself as a movie apart from the original work.
"He's a very busy guy and a very prolific writer," Selick said, "so it's better to not have the constant interaction, but rather check-ins with the 'father' of the story."
Do you think Neil Gaiman's children's book "Coraline" will prove to be well-matched with Henry Selick as the movie's director? What kind of a an experience are you expecting to see when it comes to theaters? Sound off with your thoughts in the comment section below.