Neil Gaiman on why now is finally the right time to adapt The Sandman

Neil Gaiman’s brilliant The Sandman has been around for decades, but only now are we finally getting a screen adaptation, on Netflix.

Author Neil Gaiman has been working on some pretty big projects in quarantine, including Netflix’s much-anticipated adaptation of The Sandman, his seminal fantasy comic. He talked about it on Late Night with Seth Meyers (through video conferencing, of course), comparing quarantine to “being locked in the cellar with an unexploded bomb—and several venomous snakes. And it’s been going on for ages, and you’re kind of bored, but you’re also kinda worrying about the bomb.”

Sadly, he believes the whole situation has distracted him from writing more stories. “Those bits of my head which make up stories are much more busy sort of going ‘What is happening in real life?'” So much for the myth of quarantine increasing productivity.

“As an author of fiction, it’s my job to be convincing,” Gaiman explained. “It’s my job to make up things that would convince you that they could really happen.  Real-life has no such obligations and right now we’re all wandering around a scenario that is, frankly, incredibly unconvincing. I mean, this Trump character and everything that’s happened in the last week and everything that’s happened in the last year. It’s all just unconvincing, but that doesn’t matter because it’s real.”

On The Sandman

Gaiman is also working on American Gods, which is currently airing its third season on Starz. He talked about how the experience of working on that show compares to working on The Sandman:

"I was recently in Shepperton Studios in London, on the set of Sandman which Netflix is doing. And it was meeting characters that I had created 30-something years ago and for them to meet me was a very peculiar experience indeed. I’ve sort of got used to it with American Gods because I’ve been hanging around with this lot for five years. The amazing Ricky Whittle, Yetide Badaki, Bruce Langley, all of these guys are wonderful. They’re kinda used to me. But the Sandman lot are just like, ‘he’s here.’ That was glorious and funny, and sort of a big scary, too."

That said, we don’t know exactly who’s in the cast. There are several rumors, including Tom Sturridge as Dream and Dacre Montgomery as The Corinthian, but nothing is confirmed yet. The cast is being kept under lock and key.

This isn’t the first time someone has tried to adapt The Sandman for the screen, but it does seem like the first time it’ll actually happen. Gaiman touches on an attempt by Warner Bros. not long after the comics started to come out in the late ’80s:

"I think a lot of it just has to do with the nature of television and the changing nature of television and film. For about 30 years Warner Bros. wanted to do adaptations of Sandman which meant that they’d turn it into a film, and it was always too big to be a film."

Indeed, it would have been nigh-impossible to cram all 10 Sandman volumes into one movie, or even into a series of movies. But now that expensive, long-form television is the norm, the time finally seems right for this story to be told. “Now, in this new weird world where people actually treat television novelistically, The fact that you’ve got sort of 85 hours of Sandman pre-written and existing. It’s a feature, it’s not a bug.”

The Sandman is currently filming. There is no release date in place. In the meantime, we can enjoy American Gods season 3 on Amazon Prime Video!

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