Nearly three and a half decades after comic book audiences were introduced to DC Comics’ modern Sandman, the epic story from creators Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg is coming to live action with a highly-anticipated epic series from Netflix. The Sandman Season 1 premieres August 5 on the streamer, and KSiteTV recently was among the outlets that was able to speak with Neil Gaiman about this project at the Comic-Con International in San Diego.
Gaiman is one of the most celebrated authors of modern times, with credits including Good Omens, Coraline, American Gods, Stardust and more. His work on Sandman was one of the biggest reasons DC Comics launched their Vertigo imprint under editor Karen Berger 30 years ago, influencing a generation of creators to tell innovative stories. Sandman has also been one of the most consistently reprinted and enjoyed series in comics history with a thriving trade paperback collection and numerous spinoffs including Lucifer who was previously adapted into TV series starring Tom Ellis as Lucifer Morningstar.
“What was magic about this whole thing was that you had a show being made by Sandman fans, and being crewed by Sandman fans, and being staffed by Sandman fans,” Gaiman noted when speaking to us at the roundtable. “A few weeks ago, I was in London, walking through a street market on a chilly Sunday morning, and all of a sudden one of the props people who had been on the Sandman show just came running over and said ‘I just have to tell you, I was doing props on Sandman! I’m such a fan. And my brother is such a fan. And it’s the coolest job I’ve ever gotten in my whole life. And it was I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything that cool again, because I was doing props on Sandman!‘ That makes me so happy. Those were our people,” he recalled.
“I don’t know if you’ve talked to Gwendoline [Christie] yet,” he continued, “but if you talk to Gwendoline, you talk to Tom [Sturridge], you talk to these guys… and as far as they’re concerned, they’re doing something that is… I will use the word kind of advisedly, but you can make fun of me if you like… sacred. They’re doing something kind of holy. It’s big, and it’s important, and it’s not to be taken lightly, and that knowledge is what they bring with them.”
Gaiman even noticed that the love and interest in Sandman informed certain actors’ performances, specifically pointing out something he noticed from Kirby Howell-Baptiste who is playing Death. Hundreds of actors were seen before they got to Kirby in auditions, and she got the part because she was the one who could deliver Death’s lines correctly. “It was only today, talking to her, that I tweaked that she said the lines right because she’d been a Sandman fan, and she loved Death, and she knew what Death sounded like and how those lines should be delivered, so she delivered them as Death, rather than being an actress getting a bunch of sides and going, ‘oh, this is a weird kind of dialogue.’ I think for all of us, that was the most important thing of all,” Gaiman said.
And all puns aside, it sounds like The Sandman is a dream come true for the creator.
“It’s something that almost shouldn’t have happened, because the odds against this happening are enormous,” he amazed. “For 30 odd years, people were trying to make Sandman films. They were trying to take 3000 pages of Sandman and somehow condense it successfully into two hours of cinema, and it never worked, and it wasn’t a thing.”
“It took that happening and me having show-run Good Omens and everybody suddenly going, ‘oh, he’s not just the writer, who is a weird thing that we need to keep as far away from this as possible. He’s a showrunner, and he made this adaptation. He understands this stuff. Why don’t we bring him in?’ Then it took finding [showrunner/EP/writer] Allan Heinberg. It took this golden era of TV streaming. It took something of the size of Netflix to say, ‘yes, here is the CGI budget that you’re going to need to make this,’ and it all came together,” he continued.
“There is no part of me that goes ‘I wish we could have made this in 1997,’ because we couldn’t have made this in 1997. But we could make it now, and we have, and we are so lucky.”
“It was enormously important to me [to have the right pronunciation], because back in 1984-ish when I met Alan Moore for the first time ever a little convention in Britain in Birmingham, I said, ‘I’m loving your new John Constanteen character!’ and he said ‘no, Neil, it’s actually John Constantine.’ I went ‘right!’ and from there on, it was always John Constantine,” Gaiman recalls.
“That’s how Alan pronounced it. I was fascinated that suddenly, DC in the late 90s, early 2000s seem to have changed the pronunciation. As far as I was concerned, that’s all right. It also gives me a nice kind of thing where if people grumble that it’s not Matt Ryan or Keanu Reeves, I can say ‘no, no! They are playing John Constantine. We have a Joanna Constantine. It’s a different part’,” Gaiman explained.
The Sandman premieres August 5 on Netflix. Stay tuned to KSiteTV in the coming days for more content and interviews related to the show!
