Neil Gaiman charges Terry Gilliam a groat for book option

R.U. Sirius offers up a double scoop of Neil Gaiman this week. First, he interviewed Gaiman on this week’s The RU Sirius Show. And then he published the text version on 10 Zen Monkeys.

RU SIRIUS: You're doing something with Terry Gilliam, who is absolutely one of my favorite directors.

NEIL GAIMAN: Bless! I hope that it happens. Terry has been working for many years on Good Omens, which is the novel that Terry Pratchett and I co-wrote about the end of the world…

Terry Gilliam has loved the book for years. He has been working on it for awhile. He recently came to us and said, "OK. I'm going to get the rights back to the script that I wrote with this guy called Tony Grisoni a few years ago. What is it going to cost me to get the option for myself?" Terry and I put our heads together and thought, well, we really want Terry Gilliam to make it -- we want this to be a Terry Gilliam film. We've said no to lots of people who want to make it into a cool, big commercial film... We decided that it should cost him a groat. And I don't believe they've actually made groats, which is an old English coin worth about fourpence, since about the 1780s. Which means he is going to have to go to EBay.

RU: He's going to have to do some searching… a magical quest.

GAIMAN: I mean frankly they're really cheap. We figured out we were going to need Farthings to pay the agent commission on a groat. I went to EBay and picked up a farthing for practically nothing.

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