Official Death: The High Cost of Living thread.

[LanternFan]

Well she is.

 

[SaxtonTemple]

What about Zooey Deschanel ? Since i'ven seen her with a top hat in the Hitchhiker's guide, i thought she would make a great Death.

 

[Sandman138]

Oooooooooooo... I like.

After seeing The Fountain, I'm also keen on Rachel Weisz.

 

[Eddie Dean]

I could see Zooey.

 

[LanternFan]

What about Zooey Deschanel ? Since i'ven seen her with a top hat in the Hitchhiker's guide, i thought she would make a great Death.

Wow. Zoey. If there's one actress more talented and yummy than Summer Glau, she is it.

I wanna eat my breakfast off of Zoey's backside.

 

[Antonello Blueberry]

http://www.filmick.co.uk/2007/05/want-to-know-who-is-going-to-play-neil.html

Want To Know Who Is Going To Play Neil Gaiman's Death? Don't We All StumbleUpon Toolbar
Later this year - if all goes well - Neil Gaiman will be directing his first feature film. It's an adaptation of his Death: The High Cost of Living mini-series, and - of course - he's scripted it.

This was the film he was discussing with Guillermo del Toro at the meeting a couple of weeks back, as I suspected. I've now had this 100% confirmed.

What more do I know? That the film will most likely shoot in late autumn, early winter, and in the UK, though the comic takes place (mainly) in the US. I also know that, as he's discussed before, Shia LaBeouf is almost certainly going to play the male lead - in the comics he was called Sexton Furnival - and that Death, or Didi as she calls herself in her mortal form, has snagged the interest of one famous young actress in particular. The Death hunt is done, if the deal works out, and soon she'll be named.

No news at all on who will play the Eremite or Mad Hetty, though it's hard to believe Miriam Margolyes won't get offered the latter role once casting moves into top gear.

Gaiman has mentioned that there is some business in the film's script that there was simply no room for in the comic - something about Buddhist monks 'running around', for example.

And there's a small hint that the actress is Rachel McAdams...

 

[Donnie Darko]

damn it I want to know for sure who it's gonna be

 

[Ring Deacon]

I can't wait for this movie. And if it does good they need to do Death "The time of you life" for the sequel.

 

[Antonello Blueberry]

http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=12434

DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF STRIKING
11.06.07
By Devin Faraci
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Neil Gaiman has been gearing up the last few months to make his feature directorial debut with an adaptation of his own comic, Death: The High Cost of Living, which sees the anthropomorphic personification of death assume mortal form for one day out of a century (yes, shades of Meet Joe Black). As part of the preparation, he spent some time on the set of Hellboy II, shadowing Guillermo del Toro to see how a great director works. While there was nothing official, there was some belief that work on Death would begin in earnest after that visit. When I sat down with Neil for a one on one about Beowulf, the all-CG film that he cowrote with Roger Avery (and which is actually quite incredibly terrific), I asked him where he was in terms of getting started on Death, and the answer was quite simple: 'Right now we're on strike.'

I was surprised, since I thought that Gaiman had pretty much finished the script, but it turns out that among the many things he learned from his time with Guillermo was that he needed to take another pass at it. 'I was looking forward to rolling up my sleeves post-Guillermo, but I realized one of the things about the draft is that it has some scenes I don't want to shoot. And I thought, "I should fix that. I should rewrite them into scenes I want to shoot. And I can." I would watch the way Guillermo would tailor material towards himself as a director, and it was like how I would tailor things for an artist. I would give them things they like to draw and they're good at drawing, and that will make you look good. I thought I should actually do that with this script and me as a director, which I wasn't doing. I was writing it for a hypothetical director, and now I need to do a me as director draft. That's really the next thing that has to happen. But that's just personally. We'll see. There are lots of things happening on Death, but they all seem to be contingent on each other and there's nothing I would feel comfortable talking about for fear of jinxing everything."

The path of Sandman and his sister, Death, to the screen has been long and convoluted - Beowulf began when Gaiman called Avery to basically thank him for leaving a [/FONT][FONT=verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Sandman [/FONT][FONT=verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif]adaptation rather than turn Dream into a fist fighting crime fighter - and it looks like we're still not in the home stretch. I'm a fan of Gaiman's short film, A Short Film About John Bolton, and have been looking forward to what he could pull off with Death: The High Cost of Living. I'll remain looking forward, and hope that Death isn't another casualty of a long and ugly strike.

Look for the rest of the Neil Gaiman interview, as well as an exclusive chat with Roger Avery, in the coming days. And start looking forward to Beowulf - the movie delivers.

[/FONT]

 

[Rac]

I hope this'll turn out to be good. I liked the comic very much.

 

[Tron Bonne]

Quick question: How old is Death suppose to appear in The Sandman series? I was always under the impression she was suppose to look like a late-teenaged girl, right?

 

[Sandman138]

More like early to mid twenties.

 

[st barbara]

With her slight build "Death" could be any apparent age from mid teens to twenties. The question, of course, is "Will we ever get this movie or will it, like any projected D C film that doen't feature Superman or Batman, disappear into the ether ?"

 

[Sandman138]

I hope it doesn't get made. It's a decent story, but only so long as you have read all of Sandman.

 

[st barbara]

I hope it doesn't get made. It's a decent story, but only so long as you have read all of Sandman.

Not necessarily. I read "Death: The High Cost Of Living" before I had read more than a couple of issues of Sandman and had no trouble with it, in fact I loved it !

 

[Rac]

Q: People always want to know about Death: The High Cost of Living.
Gaiman: Well, that one is mad. We kept almost getting it together, you know, like somebody climbing up the edge of a well. You’re an inch or two away from the top, and then you fall to the bottom and suddenly the film company isn’t there anymore or whatever. We just set it up again at a Warner-related company and everything was all ready. It was weird, though. If you had asked me in March of this year about Death, I would have told you that I thought it was pretty definitely dead. And if you’d asked me in April, I would have been thrilled and happy and said, "No, no, no, it’s absolutely on. And then in June, July, the new powers that be at DC and Warner basically closed everything down.

Really?
So everything got closed down for reevaluation to decide what it was, to decide if they were making it or not. And Death is one of those things that’s been closed down. So, whether or not it will come back to life, I don’t know. Death seems amazingly hard to kill. And the truth is I will be happy either way. It was one of those things where I really wanted to make a Death movie because I knew that for me, the tone of voice was the most important thing about the movie. I didn’t want somebody to make a bad Death movie anymore than I want anybody to make a bad Sandman movie or TV series or whatever. So that’s the bit that’s important to me: Is it any good?

I’m lucky in that the money doesn’t matter. Actually, I say that as if that’s something that I’ve got now, but the money never mattered. On things like that, it was always the art. Back in 1992, I was sent in to have a meeting at Warner Bros. with Lisa Henson, who was a VP of production there, about a Sandman movie. I sat down and she said, “Well what do you want us to do?” And I said, “Well, would you mind not doing it? Because I’m working on the comic and it’s going really well, and it will be really messy.” And she said, “In all the years I’ve worked here, nobody’s come into this office and asked me not to make a movie before.” And I said, “Well I’m asking you not to make the movie.” And they didn’t, and I was incredibly relieved. It’s so easy with comics to get it wrong. And it’s also very easy for a bad movie to replace a good comic in the public mind. You know, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Howard the Duck.

There’s some retro-nostalgia love out there for Howard the Duck.
No, there isn’t. I do not believe that. It’s there and it goes away the moment you watch it. You can feel it in your heart and then you see that dwarf in the duck suit clomping around and you go, “Aaaaaaaaaah … ”

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/10/the_vulture_transcript_neil_ga.html

 

[Octoberist]

I have to be honest; if the movie was to be made, I can't see it being a hit. I've read the book and it's very small.

If they advertise as a small indie-type film and had a low budget, sure. If it's like a 50 million dollar project, it'll end up being like poor Scott Pilgrim at the Box Office.