THE SANDMAN
IN DERAM
THE SANDMAN ON TV? SOMETIMES DREAMS DO COME TRUE… EXECUTIVE PRODUCER DAVID S GOYER EXPLAINS HOW HE HELPED BRING NEIL GAIMAN’S MASTERPIECE TO LIFE
WORDS: WILL SALMON
THE SANDMAN IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ADAPT.”
That’s long been the received wisdom on Neil Gaiman’s legendary comic book. Of course, we live in an age where seemingly impossible-to-adapt works are, in fact, being faithfully adapted with some regularity. Zack Snyder made his by-the-book version of Watchmen in 2009. Ben Wheatley delivered a pretty accurate take on JG Ballard’s High-Rise in 2015. And last year Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was released to massive acclaim and enough box office receipts to satisfy Baron Vladimir Harkonnen himself.
Still, none of those were The Sandman. Created by Gaiman along with artists Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg, the DC Comics series wove mythology, religion, folklore, urban legends and pulp horror into a single grand tapestry. Over 75 issues between 1989 and 1996 it told the story of Dream of the Endless, an immortal being who rules over the world of the unconscious. When a group of occultists try to imprison his sister Death on Earth, they capture him instead and hold him prisoner for decades. He eventually escapes but the consequences of his protracted absence from the Dreaming are vast. Part ongoing narrative, part anthology, The Sandman is less a single story, more an exploration of the nature of storytelling itself.
Many have tried to adapt the series but all have failed – until now. “I feel like I’ve fallen into a niche where a lot of what I do now is adapting things that are considered unadaptable,” says executive producer David S Goyer. “I was an early adopter, I read the first floppy,” he adds of his love of the source material. “Over the intervening decades, I would check in with Warner Bros to see who had the rights, but I didn’t have enough political capital to to get it going.”
All that changed thanks to an encounter with the Caped Crusader… Goyer was hired to co-write Batman Begins with director Christopher Nolan. The success of that film – and the two mega-hit sequels which he also helped storyline – finally gave him the clout he needed to get things moving with his passion project. He pitched a Sandman TV show to Warner Bros, but the studio was intent on making it into a film instead.
Still, they hired Goyer to produce the movie and he accepted the job on the understanding that he could include the comic’s key creator in the process. “I wanted Neil to be an executive producer. No one had ever thought to involve him before because, even eight years ago, he was already Neil Gaiman with a capital N and a capital G.”