Bryan Fuller has opened up about his TV show of Neil Gaiman’s masterpiece American Gods and revealed that we’re all going to have to be patient.
Speaking to Crave Online, the Hannibal and Pushing Daisies creator said “Right now we are breaking the third episode, and then if it does go, it would start filming sometime mid-to-late 2015 and probably wouldn’t be on anybody’s television until 2016. But that’s cruising along very nicely.”
It’s also a great relief to hear that Gaiman himself will play an active role in the show’s development. “Neil’s executive producing and he’s very involved. He’s given birth to the baby, raised to the baby, and now Michael Green and I are marrying the baby. So the relationship is similar in that way, where he is absolutely integral to the process and also very excited just to see it coming together in the fashion that it is.”
As for Gaiman writing an episode, Fuller commented “He’d better. He’d god damn well better.”
Fuller and his Hannibal team have done a tremendous job using Thomas Harris’ novels as a jumping-off point for the TV show, remaining faithful and offering surprises. When it comes to adapting Gaiman’s book about the collision of the gods of the old worlds and new, Fuller used HBO’s Game Of Thrones as a point of reference.
“It’s basically the following the events of the books but expanding those events, and expanding the point of view to go above and beyond Shadow and Wednesday,” he explained. “In that way, as with Game of Thrones there are dozens of characters that you’re tracking through the events and that’s probably the biggest similarities between the worlds, in that there’s a wide variety of characters at play.”
Fans of Gaiman’s work will also be pleased to hear that Anansi Boys, which takes place in the same universe and shares a character (although having a mostly much lighter tone), will be drawn on for the American Gods TV show.
“I believe that we have permission to use – since Anansi Boys are in the world of American Gods – that we would be allowed to use those as well.”
We couldn’t be more excited to see what Fuller and Michael Green do with American Gods. Watching Hannibal grow into its own incredible thing while remaining very much linked to the world that Thomas Harris created has been absolutely thrilling, so the prospect of Fuller taking on a novel as grand in scope and scale as American Gods, well…it’s pretty exciting, isn’t it? We’re willing to bet that it will be worth waiting for.
You can buy American Gods for £5.03 at Amazon.co.uk and you can keep up with the latest genre news with the new issue of SciFiNow.
