'Those lines, reducing me to tears' - Neil Gaiman on watching 'The Sandman' come to life on Netflix

Record ID: 1685942

  • Title: 'Those lines, reducing me to tears' - Neil Gaiman on watching 'The Sandman' come to life on Netflix
  • Date: 23rd August 2022
  • Summary: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (AUGUST 22, 2022) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF "THE SANDMAN" WRITER, NEIL GAIMAN, ON STAGE AT THE 92ND STREET Y, NEW YORK (92NY) VARIOUS OF GAIMAN IN A SIT-DOWN INTERVIEW (SOUNDBITE) (English) "THE SANDMAN" WRITER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, NEIL GAIMAN, SAYING "Mostly what I remember was the absolute terror of being given my own comic book because Karen Berger, a wonderful editor at DC Comics, had basically said to me, 'We just want to raise your profile. What would you like to do?' And I suggested a whole bunch of characters to her, and she said no to all of them and then said, 'What about that Sandman thing you were talking about?' I'm like, 'Oh, yeah, yeah. All right, I'll do that.' And I put together an outline for her. I did not expect it to work. And people now, when I say that, they act as if this is some kind of peculiar, false modesty. And I have to explain that in the world I grew up in as somebody who loved comics, I was hoping to be a minor critical success. And a minor critical success was exactly the same thing as a major commercial failure. There were the comics that the critics liked, and they were the comics that people bought, and they weren't normally the same thing." GAIMAN ON STAGE AT THE 92NY (SOUNDBITE) (English) "THE SANDMAN" WRITER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, NEIL GAIMAN, SAYING "I was trying to write the kind of comic that the critics would like rather than the kind of comic people would buy. So I figured, great, I've got a year of learning how to write comics. I'll write an eight-issue storyline, and then they'll phone me up and say, 'You're canceled. We're really sorry. You have four issues to go with until the end of the year and then we're done.' Because that was how DC Comics used to do it back then. You'd get 12 issues and then you were done. And I was like, 'OK, I can live with that.' So I plotted out an eight-issue storyline, figured the last four would be short stories and that would be that. And instead, by the time we got to issue eight, we were selling more copies than anything like that had sold in decades, which meant that I got to finish my story. It meant I got to create a 75-issue story that actually ended when I was done. And of all of the things that 'Sandman' changed, of all of the commercial things that we changed, of all of the rules that we broke, that's still the one I'm the most proud of." GAIMAN ON STAGE AT THE 92NY (SOUNDBITE) (English) "THE SANDMAN" WRITER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, NEIL GAIMAN, SAYING: "There are definitely places where I get to look at things and go, 'OK well, that was how we did it then. It's 30 years later. What are we doing now?' One thing I loved was getting to open up the choices more. So I would do a thing where when we were casting, when we were looking at characters, we would ask the question, 'Is there any particular reason why this character has to be male? Is there any reason why this character has to be white?' And sometimes, quite often, the answer will be yes and they do and you keep things. But whenever they weren't, it would be like, 'OK well then we have a larger pool of people to actually draw on, a larger bunch of people we can go out to for an audition, a larger bunch of people that we can look at.' And very often, not always, we would wind up with a woman in a role that had been a man's." GAIMAN ON STAGE AT THE 92NY (SOUNDBITE) (English) "THE SANDMAN" WRITER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, NEIL GAIMAN, SAYING: "I'm watching people walking around saying lines that I wrote 34 years ago, and those lines are reducing me, now, here, to tears. I'm watching Death and I'm watching a scene I wrote when I was 27 and now I'm 61 and it's really powerful. It's really beautiful. And it's just as good a scene as I'd ever hoped, and in a lot of ways it's a lot more powerful. I'd read it on paper over the years, and I read it in script form and I'd written it originally. But this is the first time I felt my eyes prickling and realizing that I was absolutely emotionally there." GAIMAN ON STAGE AT THE 92NY (SOUNDBITE) (English) "THE SANDMAN" WRITER AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, NEIL GAIMAN, ON HOW HE'S FEELING AS A RESULT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, SAYING: "What I've noticed over the last few years is I take less for granted. I had a very extreme kind of lockdown and pandemic. The strangest bit for me was December 2020, going from Scotland to the Isle of Skye, where I had literally not seen anybody for nine months to flying from there to New Zealand. And coming out of quarantine, going with my wife Amanda, to a local café, and just suddenly being completely overwhelmed by the fact that there were people everywhere and that they were just having a normal life and they were eating their bagels and drinking their coffee, and it was all a bit too much. And I had to sit down and just go, 'I'm not sure I can cope with all this.' It wasn't like coming out of lockdown gradually. It was like being zapped from lockdown, ultimate lockdown world, into normal world. And so that as an experience, was very moving, meaningful, and it taught me not to take anything for granted. And then being for most of the next 14, 15 months in New Zealand, again, I was going, 'I cannot take a single moment of this for granted because there are people elsewhere who do not have it.' And then of course, New Zealand went hard into lockdown when the rest of the world wasn't. So I was getting it again from both sides. It was educational and it taught me mostly to really, really value and treasure the time with my son. I wound up away from him, stuck away from him for nine months because of my own stupidity in just assuming that everything would be sorted out in a couple of weeks and it wasn't. So I absolutely am treasuring all the time I get with him since then."
  • Embargoed: 6th September 2022 17:43
  • Keywords: Neil Gaiman Netflix The Sandman author
  • Location: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES / UNKNOWN FILMING LOCATIONS
  • City: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES / UNKNOWN FILMING LOCATIONS
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: Arts/Culture/Entertainment,Television,United States
  • Reuters ID: LVA001991922082022RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: British writer Neil Gaiman’s award-winning comic book ''The Sandman'' has been adapted into a live-action series for Netflix.
    Gaiman's character, Sandman, more commonly known as Dream or Morpheus, is a deity who personifies dreams and stories.
    After he’s captured, both the waking and dream worlds are changed.
    When he escapes, he sets out to mend the mistakes that he has made.
    Speaking to Reuters on Monday (August 22) at the 92nd Street Y, New York, Gaiman, who is one of the writers and executive producers on the fantasy drama, recalled a feeling of "terror" at being given his own comic book 34 years ago.
    "I did not expect it to work," he said. "And people now, when I say that, they act as if this is some kind of peculiar, false modesty. And I have to explain that in the world I grew up in as somebody who loved comics, I was hoping to be a minor critical success. And a minor critical success was exactly the same thing as a major commercial failure. There were the comics that the critics liked, and they were the comics that people bought, and they weren't normally the same thing."
    Gaiman aimed to write a critically acclaimed comic book.
    He thought DC Comics would give him 12 issues and he would be done.
    "Instead, by the time we got to issue eight, we were selling more copies than anything like that had sold in decades, which meant that I got to finish my story," he said. "It meant I got to create a 75-issue story that actually ended when I was done. And of all of the things that 'Sandman' changed, of all of the commercial things that we changed, of all of the rules that we broke, that's still the one I'm the most proud of."
    Published by DC Comics, there were 75 single issues of the comic, which ran from 1989 to 1996 as well as 11 collective volumes.
    Gaiman was moved watching his comic jump from the page to the small screen.
    "I'm watching people walking around saying lines that I wrote 34 years ago, and those lines are reducing me, now, here, to tears," he said. "I'm watching Death and I'm watching a scene I wrote when I was 27 and now I'm 61 and it's really powerful. It's really beautiful. And it's just as good a scene as I'd ever hoped, and in a lot of ways it's a lot more powerful. I'd read it on paper over the years, and I read it in script form and I'd written it originally. But this is the first time I felt my eyes prickling and realizing that I was absolutely emotionally there."
    The series debuted on Netflix on August 5.
    (Production: Hussein Waaile, Joan Soley, Roselle Chen)
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