the book inspired his vision for the film, Vaughn said that he wanted "to do Princess Bride with a Midnight Run overtone." One of the difficulties with adapting the novel was its earnest and dark nature: an adult fairy tale in which sex and violence are presented unflinchingly. With Gaiman's blessing given to the screenwriters, the movie version has a greater element of whimsy and humour. Gaiman did not want people to go to the theatre to see a film that attempted, but failed, to be completely loyal to the book. After creating the audiobook version of the novel, Gaiman realised that there were 10½ hours of material in the book. This led him to acknowledge that the film would have to compress the novel, leaving out portions of the work. Budgetary concerns also factored into the adaptation, even with the level of 2006 technology. Gaiman understood the need to move the plot along faster: "In the book, Tristan crosses the wall, meets a strange creature, goes through the wood of vampire trees and, as his reward, gets the Babylon candle. Now we skip that. He gets the candle and just lights it and gets to Yvaine earlier. Otherwise, that would take an hour." Also the newly created character of Ferdy the Fence was used to push people together faster. Vaughn acknowledges the changes from the book were substantial, the character Captain Shakespeare was expanded extensively from the novel, where Captain Alberic was only briefly mentioned and the last half hour of the film was almost entirely different from the book. Vaughn and Goldman decided that the witches needed names, as in the book they were collectively the Lilim. They chose names from classical sources that coincidentally included names found in Gaiman's The Books of Magic (Empusa) and Neverwhere (Lamia). On the film's differences from the novel, Gaiman commented, "I sort of feel like my grounding in comics was actually very useful because in my head, that's just the Earth-Two version of Stardust. It's a parallel Earth version of Stardust, which has Robert De Niro and stuff. And I get people who come to the book from having loved the movie who are really disappointed at some of the stuff that isn't there that Matthew brought." Responding to a fan's statement about preferring the film's climax compared to the book, Gaiman clarified that he in fact had suggested the different