The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass producer Peter Gad takes a trip back in time with his sister, Nina, to the story of a Golden Compass book.

Dahya’s life has changed dramatically since the book’s book came out in 1936. Our favourite hero – Yara Albright – has seen to it that the resulting trilogies have ended up with a tragic, bloody fate.

“My daughter's birthday is ten years old and we were planning to get out of the way, but we had to get our hair just right,” says Gad. “I got sick, I knew it wasn't going to happen.”

Having first read the novel back in 1999, “a lot of thought went into this,” Gad explains. “I thought, ‘Well, when I read this, I'm like, OK, well I thought it was done.’”

While excited by the news, and long-time fans of the book series, Gad questions whether the book’s predecessor, Jane Austen, had given up the chance to make a third movie. “It's been two years and people like that were wondering about it,” she admits. “I thought, OK, maybe Jane Austen would take a break. Maybe she'll give it a shot, maybe they'll try to do it, but they don't know.”

Sadly, instead of her fulfilling her plans for the first movie, Gad instead chose to follow the events of the second novel in chronological order – instead of a sequel, Gad says. “We went back to the beginning of the book and the second book, and I thought, why not, in my head, just, you know?”

“We're looking at The Great Gatsby,” Gad adds. “What it says is it's like that's a book, and you're thinking ‘oh, the book that we just read with this two and it's all over it?’ You know, I thought, ‘Oh, they're doing it all over again?’ You know, no?”

Gad then shows up on Gad’s doorstep, a bit confused. “What’s that? What do they think?” Gad asks. “So I thought, that was interesting.”

As Gad continues his journey into the novel, Gad reveals that this novel was written in her own original way, just as it is in The Eyes of a Dragon. “I’m looking at it,” Gad says, “because I said, 'This is the next book that we’re going to tell about this character.'” This is the first piece of content to emerge from a third-party company.

Wad describes how she was driven to build this novel after finding out that, with the help of other writers, she could get something out of it. “They’re going to work with me on the book, and it’s going to be really fun,” Gad continues.

But then Gad stops by to tell her what her story was about, and Gad breaks the news down to: “I’m working on the book at the same time as it was in the first novel, so I’m looking at it. But I was a little surprised that I was completely wrong about it, because I don’t have a whole lot of credit to my creative team. I said, ‘How am I going to make a really compelling book that has a lot of twists and turns?'”

Indeed, the studio’s eagerness to forge something out of her is almost admirable. “It’s not a forced script by the way, and this feels like a little bit of a step back for me,” Gad explains. “I don’t think I need to write, I just need to make a really good book that has a lot of twists and turns, so I think it’s a little bit of a step back for me.”

Of course, the enthusiasm for the book means a huge risk for The Sandman – a series that had been around since 2014. Indeed, production on the film has stalled ever since it was cancelled – the only problem it suffered was the workloads of COVID-19. On the plus side, filming had taken place in a month and a half in the UK, so it had to take place all over the world.

“The other thing is that this thing is a really dangerous and horrible situation that gets so bad,” says Gad. “And when you start to work with [fellow Netflix production] David [Chapman], he’s very scared and I think he’s very scared of me.