The movie that made Neil Gaiman finally feel understood: “A completely new one for me”
He may have always felt like an outsider during his younger years, but based on how many times his bibliography has been snapped up for adaptation on both film and television, it would be safe to say that Neil Gaiman firmly punctured the mainstream.
After decades in development hell, The Sandman finally escaped to become one of the most popular shows on streaming following its Netflix premiere, with Gaiman’s comic book universe expanding even further through the recent addition of Dead Boy Detectives to the platform’s content library.
American Gods ran for three seasons, Henry Selick’s stop-motion Coraline did a stellar job scarring a generation of impressionably young viewers with its entrancing fantasy, while Matthew Vaughn’s lavish Stardust became a firm cult favourite after initially under-performing at the box office during its theatrical run.
Not that he’s remained beholden to his own back catalogue, either, with Gaiman scripting the English-language translation of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke and co-writing Robert Zemeckis’ performance-captured Beowulf, but all it took was a single viewing of a controversial drama for the author to find himself feeling understood for the very first time.
Slapped with the dreaded X-rating at the time of its release in 1968, Lindsay Anderson’s If… generated as much controversy as it did acclaim, winning the Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival and coming under intense criticism for its depictions of violence and adolescent disillusionment.
Malcolm McDowell’s breakthrough role finds him playing the rebellious Travis, who returns to his posh public school only to serve as the catalyst to a power struggle between students and educators alike that threatens to spiral dangerously out of control.
Naming it as one of his favourite films to Rotten Tomatoes, Gaiman’s love of If…. comes partly from the way “it allows me sometimes to explain what it was like to be a kid at an English public school,” with the depiction of the culture contained therein being presented in a way that spoke directly to him.
“I remember just watching it and suddenly feeling understood, which was a completely new one for me,” he said. “I’d be, you know, ‘This is my world’. It was like, OK, here is something Malcolm McDowell-starring, the idea of kids – while we didn’t actually shoot up the school in rebellion, it was the kind of strange stuffy environment that needed to come tumbling down, and I’d never seen that before depicted on film.”
It was McDowell’s feature debut, and his performance was so incendiary it caught the eye of a certain Stanley Kubrick, who swiftly cast him in A Clockwork Orange. He’d go on to reprise the role twice more in Anderson’s O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, giving Gaiman – just one of protagonist Mick Travis’ many fans – the chance to see the character grow up over a trilogy that spanned a decade and a half.
