Dave McKean and I had worked together very happily for about sixteen years at that point. It had always been easy. This wasn’t.

Mostly it wasn’t, because Dave and I wrote, we discovered, in completely different ways. He plans it all out, and writes every idea down on little cards, needs it to all be done before the first word of script is written; whereas I’ll talk about it to the point where I’m ready to start writing, and then I start writing and find out the rest of it as I go along. These methods of working are not entirely compatible. That was half of the problem. The other half of the problem was that Dave knew what he could and couldn’t do, in order to make a film with the money that we had, and I didn’t.

“I want to do a scene in Helena’s school,” I’d say.

“Can’t do it,” Dave would explain. “Too expensive. We’d need the class, and a teacher and kids as extras,” and then, seeing my face fall, he’d add, “but we can make the world crumple up like a piece of paper, if you want. That won’t cost us anything.”

Still, Dave’s certainties were reassuring. It’s often easier to make art if you know what your boundaries are. In the case of MirrorMask, I wrote down in the basement kitchen, where it was warm (right now I’m writing this in the kitchen of a borrowed house, which goes to demonstrate consistency, I think), while Dave mostly worked several floors up, where there was light and a grand piano.

Our touchstone was something Terry Gilliam had once said about his wonderful film Time Bandits. He said he wanted to make a film intelligent enough for children, but with enough action in it for adults. And so did we.

I started writing.

Dave would suggest things that would, he hoped, be easy and relatively cheap to make in the world of computer animation—twining shadow-tentacles or formless black bird-shapes.

Several times during that week, Dave would go off and do a first draft of a scene on his own, to show me what he meant, and I’d fold that in—the first drafts of the Giants Orbiting sequence, the Monkeybirds and the scene looking for the dome in the Dreamlands were all Dave’s, for example, as was the Librarian’s Origin of the World speech, which Dave wrote long before we started writing the film. I’d tidy them up, and noodle with the dialogue. He for his part would look over my shoulder at the dialogue I was writing on the screen and point out whenever I was starting to sound like Terry Jones writing Labyrinth, and then I would try to make it sound a bit more like me writing MirrorMask.

Henson’s had mentioned they thought there should be goblins in it somewhere, owing to their having already sold the film we were making to Sony under the working title of “Curse of the Goblin Kingdom,” so every now and again I would insert the word goblin in front of a character’s name—“Goblin Librarian” for example, while the character who doesn’t have much of a name in the current script apart from “Small Hairy” was called “Dark Goblin” in that first draft. Dave took a jaundiced view of this practice. “They’ll want to see goblins,” he’d warn me. “And there won’t be any goblins. It’ll lead to trouble.” I thought we’d probably be all right.