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Aug 05, 2022 4 mins, 10 secs
There was a time when Neil Gaiman didn’t want a movie or television show about The Sandman to be made at all.

It wound up taking more than 30 years, but The Sandman is finally getting the screen version Gaiman previously thought impossible.

Wearing his familiar black t-shirt and jacket, he talks about how “incredibly envious” he is of his younger self – the version of Neil Gaiman who fought back against a Sandman movie he didn’t think would work.

He remembers how Eric Kripke, a creator that Gaiman “loves and respects” who has lately been enjoying great success with The Boys, pitched a Sandman series for network TV circa 2010, and how Gaiman rejected it because “it really didn’t work.”.

It was the Rose Walker show or something,” Gaiman says.

It’s a show that connects the Gaiman of 2022 – who has found such success in comics, novels, film, and stage – with the young Gaiman of the late 1980s, who was handed the task of revitalizing a little-known DC Comics character and subsequently turned it into one of the greatest comic books of all time.

Gaiman has since moved on to other mediums, winning popular acclaim with American Gods among others, but he’s retained a soft spot for comics, which he once likened to hacking through a jungle.

It’s filled with tales like A Dream of a Thousand Cats, in which a secret gathering of domesticated felines learn of their kind’s true history (Gaiman says it won’t be in Season 1, but he doesn’t rule it out for later seasons).

Looking back on the comics, Gaiman talks about how ahead of its time it was in terms of representation.

In that respect, Gaiman doesn’t see much difference in whether Sandman is set in the late 1980s or 2022.

Attempts have been made since the 1990s, with one screenplay apparently being so bad that Gaiman called it “not only the worst Sandman script I’ve ever seen, but quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read.” In 2001, Gaiman argued that for an adaptation to succeed that it would need someone with the “same obsession with the source material as Peter Jackson had with Lord of the Rings or Sam Raimi had with Spider-Man.” In 2010, the TV series with Kripke was pitched for Warner Bros.

The moment finally came in 2018, when David Goyer approached Gaiman while he was busy with Good Omens – the adaptation of the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett near the beginning of his career.

Goyer subsequently connected Gaiman with Heinberg, who had his own superhero experience working on 2017’s Wonder Woman.

The three went to dinner, where Heinberg rapidly established his fan bonafides by revealing that he had met Gaiman before – at an event where he had asked the author to sign a page of The Sandman: Brief Lives for him.

“Yes, and the phone, but Neil, we were never in the same city ever,” Heinberg says, now fully engaged?

Even now, Heinberg says, Gaiman remembers not just everything he wrote, but where he was and what music he was listening to.

As for how many seasons Sandman can ultimately go, Gaiman says simply, “Until it’s done.”.

There are still years' worth of Sandman comics to get through after the conclusion of the first season.

That is the story of Sandman Overture, and telling that will be an absolute adventure, so I hope we get that far,” Gaiman says.

“Yeah,” Gaiman agrees.

Death: The High Cost of Living, it should be mentioned, was also set to be adapted into a movie, with Gaiman providing the screenplay and Guillermo del Toro serving as executive producer.

In so many ways, Sandman is the culmination of a long and winding journey – one almost as dense and complicated as the comics themselves.

He was just trying to find something for a Morpheus voice that was more talking in white on a black background, I think,” Gaiman remembers.

"I think the problem that Tom had is he is such a fan, he wanted to make it Sandman,” Gaiman agrees.

When a fan on Twitter expresses doubts about Sandman owing to how American Gods turned out, Gaiman responds bluntly, “There's a huge difference.

The Gaiman who finally gets to see Sandman turned into an actual show is “a lot older, creaks a bit, eyesight is definitely not what it was, nor is memory,” and he claims he has to look up Sandman references rather than recalling them from memory, though Heinberg disagrees

But it’s easy to see the thread connecting the Gaiman of 2022 with the Gaiman who first set out to define The Dreaming and the Endless and everything else

“And as a gift for that 29-year-old Neil, who went into the Warner Brothers offices and said, ‘Please don't make Sandman.’ It's like finally, hey, this was the thing that you envisioned when you pleaded with people not to make that movie

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