Notes on the Good Omens film (that wasn’t made)
Good Omens is finally coming to television. Hallelujah! But we came close to seeing it in cinemas nearly two decades ago.
The main reason I have been thinking about the unmade film version is because I interviewed two of the key people involved at the time: its then-director Terry Gilliam, and the book’s co-author Neil Gaiman.
Ever since those chats, I’d looked forward to one day watching Gilliam’s Good Omens. For me it was one of the great, tantalising unmade films, up there with Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon and Jodorowsky’s Dune.
But revisiting my notes from those interviews in the autumn of 2001 has made me realise it was always likely to work best as a TV series.
I interviewed Gilliam at the Watershed cinema in Bristol, mostly about a short film competition he’d been judging, but threw in some questions about the rumoured Good Omens project at the end.
Gilliam was highly aware of the challenges of trying to condense the book into a two hour film. He told me he’d been delighted to receive a message from Gaiman about the script saying the “the baby has not been thrown out with the bath-water”. But Gilliam still knew he would need to cut out some of his favourite parts, and that the budget they got might not allow them to do justice to the book’s more epic scenes.
“We’re now at the stage we’ve done a first budget and it’s more than people want to spend,” he said. “And we’re now in the battle of ‘What do you trim from the script, how do you make it cheaper, and how are we going to get this much money?’
“The plan is to shoot it next April [2002], and we need to get the money sorted out in the next month to be on that schedule, because it’s such a big special effects film it’s ridiculous. Every scene has got something in it.”
I asked him what he thought would be the most difficult part of the film to shoot.
“Well, the apocalypse has always been difficult. The live-action version has been a pretty good start… [referencing the-then recent aftermath of 9/11] so I don’t know if the movie will be as good as what we’ve seen already. I’ve got to create heaven and hell.
His next comments were the most striking, in hindsight:
“We’ve changed, not the story, but part of Good Omens. It’s a tricky thing when you take a book like that that’s so dense, so full of wonderfully funny, smart writing, and you try to reduce it to a two-hour-plus movie. And some of my favourite stuff from the book is not in there.
“It’s like cutting limbs and arms off of this child, and hoping there’ll still be something left of it at the end.
“That’s why I’m pleased that Neil liked it, and that was important. The huge apocalyptic finale is pretty rough.”
By chance, I also interviewed Neil Gaiman that same month in 2001 (who, like Gilliam, was utterly bloody lovely and provided more evidence that sometimes you really should meet your heroes). He was in Bristol promoting his new book American Gods, so we mostly discussed that, plus some bits about Sandman and Neverwhere. But I also asked how he felt things were going with the Good Omens film.
“Every time I ring bloody Terry Gilliam and say ‘What’s the progress on the Good Omens film? People keep asking me’, he’s always off doing ridiculous things like being a judge at the Cannes film festival, which I consider selfish and very unhelpful of him,” he joked. “I think he should stop doing things like that, and stay home and answer the phone!”
“The last thing I’ve heard is he has figured out a way to put the footnotes in. He’s very proud of the footnotes. He told me there will be pointy arrows, during scenes like the baby swap. In the scene where we have three babies moving round he wants signs with ‘Baby A’, ‘Baby B’ and ‘Baby C’. And I thought ‘Good, he understands the book, he understands how to do it more than I ever did.’
“I remember Terry [Pratchett] and I went out to Hollywood together and had one of those great awful, aborted film experiences which everyone should have, that was magnificently dreadful. After that we said ‘We’re done on anything to do with Good Omens films, forever’. And we spent years saying no to anyone who wanted to buy it.
“Then Terry Gilliam came along and it was like ‘Not only can you buy it, we’ll happily pay your cab fare home.’ We liked him. People say ‘Are you involved in the film?’ and we say ‘No’.”
Reading those last comments made me go back to wishing we could see the Gilliam version. It sounds like the director had hit on a Sherlock-type approach to footnotes years before the detective series. The rumours about casting at the time were also fascinating, with Johnny Depp apparently lined up as the demon Crowley and Robin Williams ready to play the angel Aziraphale.
But the director’s own comments about the difficulty condensing the story have made me realise we’re probably lucky to be in the universe where it’s ended up as a TV miniseries instead.
That fate would have appeared a downgrade back then. Gaiman told me he had been disappointed with the mid-90s BBC version of Neverwhere, shot in video and shown as half-hour episodes.
“It was a disappointment when I saw how it looked — we’d kept saying could we do it on film, and can we have 45 minute episodes, please? People are conditioned to read half hour slots as sit-coms, especially when they’re on video,” he said.
“But they shot it on video and lit it for film, thinking that would make it look better when it actually made it all look like it was shot on cheap sets, when we’d shot everything on location. It was the BBC way of doing it.
“They wanted another series. We said to them, ‘We’ll do another series if you do it on film, and if you take it up to an hour’ — and they said ‘No, no we really like this half-hour-on-video-thing, and we’d like it if we could slash your budget…’ That was the point where we said ‘We don’t want to play’.”
It is a sign of how much television has changed in the two decades since then that a six-part miniseries absolutely feels a better option now for the book than a feature film. We’ve also become used to hour-long episodes — and that television can now feature digital special effects that outshine the best effects in the films of the 90s and noughties.
Many years later, in 2014, Gilliam told another interviewer he had come round to the idea of a TV version of Good Omens instead: “It might be a perfect thing for maybe six-part TV, because then we could do the whole book.”
All of this makes me wonder — now that we’ve had successful adaptations of American Gods and Good Omens — if another long-anticipated Gaiman project might one day make it to TV.
I asked Gaiman at the time if the Sandman film was still in development. “It remains in development hell, and I hope it rots there forever,” he said. “I’d much rather no film was ever made than a crap and embarrassing film, and the scripts I’ve seen in the last few years have all been of the embarrassing sort.”
Just as it has turned out for the best that American Gods and Good Omens were left until a time when TV budgets and special effects could do them justice, it is no doubt a good thing we’ve not yet seen a filmed version of Sandman. And if film-makers struggled to fit those two novels into a film, it is hard to see how they could ever do justice to the comic book’s huge expanse of story.
The lesson from Gaiman’s most successful adaptations feels clear: be patient. Good things (Omens or otherwise) come to those who wait.
