It’s not often you get the opportunity to confront someone who didn’t give you a job. But in a new video that you’ll only see in full on Tudum, The Sandman creator Neil Gaiman gets just that opportunity. And he says... thank you?
The video sees the prolific author interviewed by another famous fantasy face: George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones. As the two discuss Gaiman’s work on the new Sandman Netflix series, Gaiman finds room to pay tribute to Martin’s unlikely influence on the long-lived comic series. “I owe all of [this] to you,” Gaiman notes.
“Yes, you do,” Martin agrees with a chuckle. Gaiman originally pitched the Sandman character to Martin, as a part of his Wild Cards connected universe of superhero storytelling. Martin turned him down, Gaiman turned to DC Comics instead and the rest is history. “It’s not the greatest decision I made in my editing career,” Martin says. Ah well. No hard feelings.
While The Sandman comics have been beloved for decades, it took quite a bit of elbow grease to make the transition to the screen. For years, Sandman adaptations died on the vine, and Gaiman almost gave up hope that one would come to fruition. “All of them failed because trying to make 3,000 pages into a two-hour film is frankly going to fail,” Gaiman tells Martin. But eventually, someone had a bright idea: Why not involve the series’ creator from the jump? “When we did our pitch, they were saying the one unique selling point that we have is we have Neil Gaman, and none of the previous adaptations did,” Gaiman says.
As the cast met in person at The Sandman’s San Diego Comic-Con panel, the author had a vision. “I got to watch some of the dynamics of their characters playing out for real. I watched Mason Alexander Park, who plays Desire, sort of gently teasing Tom Sturridge, who plays Morpheus,” Gaiman says. “There’s a cohesive friendship here, which makes me very happy. It’s like, ‘Oh, we have to carry this on because these people have to be in the same place again.’ ” Now that the Sandman has finally found his way to the world of the living, Gaiman wants to keep him here.
For more from Gaiman and Martin, including the story of The Sandman comic’s hurricane-infused birth and an anecdote about a frightening plane ride with a Death cosplayer, check out the full video above.
