Happy Sad Confused - Neil Gaiman, Vol. II

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

Neil Gaiman is a true master storyteller, known for countless works. But if one work defines him it is THE SANDMAN. Here in this live taping of the podcast, Neil returns to go in depth on the history of the comic and long and winding road to making the Netflix series that exists today. Come see Josh tape a LIVE Happy Sad Confused on October 25th in NYC with Ralph Macchio! Tickets are available here! For all of your media headlines remember to subscribe to The Wakeup newsletter here! Don't forget to check out the Happy Sad Confused patreon here! We've got exclusive episodes of GAME NIGHT, video versions of the podcast, and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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He's got a motorcycle. Get after him or have you shot? What do you mean blow up the building? From this moment on, none of you are safe. New episodes every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Prepare your ears, humans. Happy, sad, confused begins now. Today on Happy, Sad, Confused, Neil Gaiman, creator, author, and visionary on The Sandman.

Hey, guys, I'm Josh Horowitz, and welcome to another edition of Happy, Sad, Confused. And yes, we've got Neil Gaiman back on the show. For the die-hard listeners out there, we've had him on before five years ago, but This was a fun confluence of events. We got Neil Gaiman on talking about not just any project, the project, the work that in many ways made him the name he is in the literary world, in the comic book world, the Sandman. Born in late 88, I believe it first was published, and ever since then has been revered just the first. ifiably so, and has been developed non-stop, it seems, to be a film at times, a TV show at times. And it's been a long road, guys, but we're here.

And The Sandman is on Netflix. And this is a case where I think the weight was worthwhile. It was done the right way. And I think the audience is responding. I mean, we know the audience is responding. If you haven't caught it yet, truly I recommend. end this one. I think it will play for the newcomer to the Sandman universe, but it will especially play to folks like me that have read the comic, and it's worth your time in any respect. This is

a really special piece of art, the comic, and the TV show. The show has been a great success with critics, a great success with viewers. At the time we taped this, The big number that was floating around was like 200 million hours watched, which, yeah, like, how do you even wrap your brain around it? But suffice it to say, it's working. It's working with audiences. It worked with me. And it made for a great conversation. We had Neil at the 92nd Street, why, for one of our live tapings. We had a lovely, enthusiastic audience. And the vibes were great. The energy was great. And Neil was great. Neil was one of those. I mean, look, a lot of authors are maybe inward types that maybe aren't great public personas and great in that public realm, but Neil is not that. Neil is a storyteller in every respect, the voice, the, there's the way he can, he can explain his art is kind of really inspiring to hear.

So this was a great one. This was a fun, deep dive into all things, the Sandman. 95% of this conversation is just on the Sandman, on the birth of the initial comic, on the development of the show of the choices he's made in the series. This will reward especially you guys that have watched the entire run of the series. You can listen to this if you haven't watched

the entire run or any of it, I suppose. But I think best consumed this conversation would be after watching the 11 episodes of the Sandman. Yes, initially they dropped 10 episodes, and they dropped a bonus 11th episode, which actually contains two different stories, two of my favorites, by the way. We get into all of it.

So this is for the nerds out there, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. I'm one. This is where the hardcore lovers of things like Sandman, I think you're going to dig this one. There's a lot of great stuff in here from one of our greatest storytellers around. If you want to watch this,

we put up this on, on the YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Josh Horowitz. That's where we're putting up all these new videos now, these clipouts, the full videos, the archive videos. We're really building up the YouTube presence. I encourage you guys to go subscribe to the YouTube channel. Again, it's YouTube.com slash Josh Horowitz. Don't worry, Patreon, folks.

There's stuff for you there, too. We're putting it all up first for you. We're giving you exclusive announcements, exclusive videos, the first look at every video, bonus content, all of it. So, patreon.com slash happy say I confused is for, you know, the real devotees, the folks, I might even love you guys all the more than the run-of-the-mill fan. But in all seriousness, we're still making that worth every dollar you're putting it over there. So I encourage you to check out what we're doing on the Patreon.

And again, I encourage you guys to check out what we're doing on the YouTube channel, which I'm really excited about. What else to mention? Okay, so Neil Gaiman's the main event. I don't know, man. It's been a busy time. I, you know, I moderated the Neil Gaiman event at the 9-2 NY. I just did an event with Alison Brie for her wild new movie, Spin Me Round.

I've got more events coming up. We have one event that we can officially talk about, which is October 25th at Symphony Space with Ralph Machio. the link to purchase tickets to that is in the show notes so check that out there's another event that hasn't officially been announced yet but it's going to be i think pretty soon at 92 nye again that should be the end of september um and we're working on other live events um so yeah a lot of things happening i'm psyched for the fall film season i'm going to be at the toronto film festival be at the telly ride film festival i'm starting to see some of these movies um So I'm hyped. I'm excited.

And I hope you guys are, too. This is getting, you know, we're at the tail end of the summer, which is not necessarily usually the best time for film. But we're turning the corner to enter in when all the great filmmakers trot out their wares. And, yeah, it's going to be a fun few months. So I hope you follow along. All right, let's get to the main event, which is this live event that we taped at 92 NY in New York City. You're going to hear a fun, a great conversation, a thoughtful conversation with Neil Gamer.

You're going to hear the energy of the live audience. You're going to hear it all. You're going to get the nitty-gritty background of the themes and just how they put it all together to make the Sandman. I know you guys are going to enjoy this chat. As always, hit me up on Twitter, on Instagram. Let me know what you're loving and hating. Accent on the loving. You can stick to that mostly for my own sanity.

Joshua Harrow is where you can find. find me. Here it is my conversation at 92 NY with Mr. Neal, Gaynor. Good evening, everybody. Thank you. Save some of your applause for the main event. Okay, that's just a warm-up. Thank you guys so much for coming out to this 92NY event and a live, happy, sad, confused taping. So we've got, yes, yes, welcome. And welcome to our online audience and to those of you listening after the fact, this was great. You don't know it yet, but this was amazing. So we've got a real treat for you guys tonight. Truly, backstage is one of the greatest storytellers alive. He has contributed so much amazing magic. Yes, I'll use that word,

magical storytelling, in every form conceivable, whether it's comic books, graphic novels, short stories, novels, audio plays, et cetera. And now, with his seminal work, the Sandman. Decades in the making after stops and starts for literally, literal decades. This show has recently dropped, as you well know. And in the first, I think the numbers, in the first two weeks, the Sandman on Netflix was watched a combined 200 million hours, which is kind of impressive, yes. And I contributed about 11 of those. And contributing to our entertainment tonight will be the one and only give it up for Mr. Neil Gaiman. Thank you.

Thank you, Neil, for sharing your time with us today. I mean, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, but particularly at this moment. This is a moment. As I said, it's been a long journey to get here. We're going to get into all of it. into all of it. We're going to really focus on Sandman tonight because that's, look, it's your pride and joy, and here we are, and you must feel thrilled. But you tell me, what are you feeling right now two plus weeks into this run of unleashing Sandman onto the world in television

form at long last? Joy. Mostly just joy. Occasional bafflement. But, you know, The bafflement brings a certain, highlights the joy. I get baffled by, meaning what? I get baffled because I have to sort of suddenly go, okay, this is reality, isn't it? This is, I'm, I'm, so over the years at San, when I was writing Sandman as a monthly comic,

You had the comics top 100. We were always in the top 100. After, I don't know, Sandman 42, someone like that, we were often in the top 50, in the lower reaches of the top 50. You were happy with that at the time. It was sort of just where we were. And the world of comics was very strange.

because as we went up and our numbers and our readership went up the entire world of comics went into this mad explosion so Sandman 50 came out and it sold quarter of a million copies which at any other time would have made us a top five comic except that that was the month

when everything was selling millions and millions and millions so we're still down there at number 47 or whatever And eventually, the very last issue of Sandman, Sandman 75, made it to number one on the charts. And we didn't make it to number one by selling an incredible number of copies. We made it to number one because we were still selling the same number of copies that we've been selling at, you know, number 45. And everything else had gone into an implosion, and they'd stopped selling in the millions. You waited them out.

And we'd waited them out. And now, instead of selling one and a half million copies a month, they're all selling 100,000. No, now they're selling 75,000, 60,000, 55,000. We're in number one. And so that was my kind of, that's how I think of San Mahanis. We are this sort of plucky little thing that carries along in the background. And then we just existed in graphic novel form.

And over the years and over the decades, we would sell and sell and sell and sell and sell and sell and sell to the point where now millions upon millions of people have read Sandman and I sort of think of those millions and millions of people as being the yoghurt starter to make a very unfortunate analogy who got to sort of bring us out into the world because they were the people who on our first weekend of Netflix when we dropped are just like

yeah I'm going to watch Sandman now that was nine hours of my life I'm going to do it again now and those people were there and they were the ones who in a lot of ways we were kind of making it for them because if they'd hated it they would have told everybody

yes and they wouldn't be quiet about it they would not have been quiet they would not even have been polite they wouldn't have done that thing of you know like like it says in Bambi where you don't have anything nice to say you know they would have told everybody

and instead what they did was tell their friends oh there's a thing because Saman you got to watch it and that I think is what propelled us to number one in all of these what I loved is the fact

it wasn't just getting to number one in America or Australia or England or New Zealand we got number one in places where I didn't know Netflix existed you know we're still number one in Ukraine I'm so proud of that and but we're also number one in Nigeria you know it's like it's so fabulous country thank you yes we it's sort of

It's this all over the world thing, and now some countries we've drifted as far down as number two or number three, but they're still watching us. And I love this. I love that we're a phenomenon. We probably have another couple of days of being a phenomenon until House of the Dragon starts, and then maybe a week or two in which people remember that we were once a phenomenon, and then Lord of the Rings will start, and then we'll be that thing that happened a long time ago. No, but I mean, look, I do want to talk. about the journey of this both as a comic and development of this eventual Netflix series because and I know some of these stories you've told a thousand times but just for the benefit of context talk to me about where you were when you created Sandman the initial

comic I guess first published in late 1988 who was Neil Gaiman then what was Sandman to you then what was the germ of the idea I was I was let's see so moving back in time. I'm 26 years old. I'm writing a comic called Black Orchid for DC Comics. It's my first ever mainstream work.

I've written a couple of sort of more underground comics and a couple of a handful of 2000 AD shorts, but that's what I've done so far. But I'm writing Black Orchid, which Dave McKean is drawing. painting

and I get a phone call from Karen Berger, my editor and she says, look we're getting a bit worried about Black Orchid because you're two people nobody's ever heard of doing a

character nobody remembers and a female character of that and they don't sell and so we're going to give Dave McKean a Batman thing to draw. Grant Morrison has written

a thing called Arkham Asylum, so we're going to get Dave to do that. And we thought maybe you could do a monthly comic, and it would just boost your profile. And I said, okay, and she said, well, who would you like to do? And I started listing characters.

And I'd say, how about the demon? And she'd say, no, so-and-so is doing the demon. The Phantom Stranger, no, so-and-so is doing the Phantom Stranger. the forever people. No, somebody's doing the forever people. I would get more and more, you know, I'm just racking my brains for a DC.

They've said I can do a DC comics thing. What do I want to do? And eventually, Karen said, yeah, I don't like any of those ideas. What about that Sandman thing that you were talking to me and Jeanette Kahn about over dinner? and I'm like oh yeah

and that was an idea I'd had for a way of bringing back the 1972, 1973 Joe Simon Jack Kirby rather goofy sandman and she said yeah but don't

don't do that because I think he's going to be coming back in Infinity Incorporated or something just do your own do your own character call the Sandman. You can make it up from scratch. And I'm like, oh. You're saying I have creative freedom?

What? Okay. So I remember just sort of sitting thinking, going, well, this is interesting. I am somebody who was written at this point, written and sold during the course of my life, maybe 10 pieces of fiction. And now I'm being asked to write a monthly

comic. I'm going to have to come up with one story every month. Okay? So whatever I do needs to be able to take me anywhere. And I know that I get bored easily. I know I can't do

I don't have the the muscles, the engines to write a superhero comic. The villain of the week is not... It's just not going to be interesting for me. And for that matter, even if it was something like Swamp Thing, a comic I loved,

I'm not going to be able to do Monster of the Month either. Or I could do it for a while, but I would get really bored. And if I want to do this, I want something that I can go anywhere with. And so I was chewing over that. And then I was thinking, I thought about an author I loved called Roger Zelasne. And I thought, you know, there was a thing that Roger did. He did it a lot of times, but he did it particularly well in an novel called Lord of Light, where he gave us human beings who were essentially taking on the trappings

and the mantles of gods, and who kind of felt kind of superheroy. There was something about them that, you know, it wasn't exactly a superhero, but it was as if you'd boned the sea on a piano and you'd heard some of the other seas vibrating. And it's just a way. It's a It was one of those high seas, but it was vibrant. And I thought, okay, I could, what if I do that? What if I do God Comics? And I'd been vaguely, at the time, a writer-artist named John Byrne had been re-creating, reinventing Superman a bit, and he kept saying that the problem with Superman is Superman

had become too powerful, and the stories don't work if you have somebody who's too powerful. powerful. And I kept looking at that quote and thinking, I don't think that's ever the problem. I think the problem is not power. I think the problem is who you are and whether you're broken and how you react to and how you make that happen. So all of that kind of fed into the idea of an incredibly powerful being who was absolutely in an awful lot of ways screwed up and could not get out of his own way and and also the idea of writing somebody who wasn't entirely human I love the idea that he wouldn't necessarily think like us and every now and then we would just be forcibly reminded of the fact that he wasn't one of us.

You'd get sort of lulled into it. And I remember coming up with plans for how this thing was going to work. I was about to write my outline for it when we had the first hurricane in England in 500 years and my little village called Nutley, not to be confused with the one in New Jersey. Nutley was in the middle of the Ashdowne Forest, Winnie the Pooh Country, and all of the trees went down. And we were cut off for several days

and then had no power for a week. And which meant that actually was really good for me. It just forced a week of thinking. And it forced a frustrated week, but in which I just remember walking from room to room, pacing around, thinking a lot, making notes, imagining. And imagining, what was interesting is I didn't think there was a chance, I didn't think there was a hope in hell to coin a phrase that is possibly Sandman apt, that we would get beyond issue 12. I knew that it just didn't work like that. you know at issue eight they would phone me up and they'd say we're not really selling any comics

but um you have until issue 12 to wrap it up so I planned for myself an eight issue first storyline and then I was going to do four issues of short stories and then that would be that except that at issue eight we were selling yeah and we were out selling anything comparable didn't me you in different demographic you were expanding the comic book audience? I don't know that we were then. We did that. That, I think, started at issue eight.

I mean, all I can go on is my memories of signings. The very first signing I ever did was at Jim Handley's Universe. December 1988 for Sam Man 1, me and Mike Dringenberg, 14 young men in the line. me and Mike sitting there with stacks of Sandman 1 on Seoul in front of us desperate to sign them and from there on out

for about a year it was nice young men between the ages of 16 and 23 and then it started to change and then you notice that some of these nice young men were nice young women and a phenomenon was beginning to occur where the nice young men had been trying to get their

girlfriends to read comics unsuccessfully for months or years and finally they found this thing and then the girlfriend would leave and she'd take the comics with them and she'd give them to the next bloke and I was being sexually transmitted. And Neil Gaiman the best STD out there, the human. It was happening. And then, you know, not long after that, I was, you know, I remember 1991 San Diego Comic Convention, several large gentlemen in stained T-shirts came up to me during the course of the convention and said, you're in the old.

Gaiman, man, I got to shake your hand. I got to shake your hand. You bring women into my store, man. And it's like, and I would never say if you just sweep the floor, they will come back. But I would always think it. We could spend hours and there could be documentaries about the stops and starts of turning this into a film or TV show. So here's my main question, because there have been some notable attempts. Was there initially in the 90s when you first started to contemplate and take meetings? Was there a dream director, a dream, dream casting in your mind?

I know I've heard you say you admired Terry Gilliam's work. Was there someone like in your heart of hearts like, oh, if it all came together now, this would be the way to do it? All I wanted was for there not to be a bad Sandman film. I was not thinking I want a Sandman film. My first ever meeting was in March 1990 at Warner Brothers with Lisa Henson, Jim Henson's daughter, who at that point was a high exec. And at Warner's and she said, so, Saman.

I said, please don't make it. Please don't. I'm just getting started on the comic. It's just getting going. It's getting attention. Honestly, I don't think you could make a good one right now. and just please, it will be a distraction. She's like, nobody's ever come into my office before

and asked me not to make a movie. You understand how this works, right? And I'm like, well, I am. And she said, okay, well, we won't make it. And I said, thank you. And we have been friends ever since. By 1996, I was being taken to Warner's, where the then-President Warner Brothers sat me down

and told me that Michael Jackson had phoned him, the day before and asked him if he could star as Morpheus and the Sandman, so there was a lot of interest in this, and they knew that it was one of the crown jewels, and what did I think?

And I'm like, ooh. And there were honestly some decent scripts. I, you know, I know that the way that I phrase it is as if I was fighting to stop bad versions. There were, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio wrote the best script I think they could have written at the time.

These were the Pirates of the Caribbean screenwriters as I recall. Irish the Caribbean. Before they were famous for pilots, the Caribbean, before they were famous for men in black, they did, you know, they wrote some fabulous Sandman scripts. The problem was that any attempt at doing a Sandman script where you're looking at basically, you know, these days 3,000 pages, of story, back then 2,000 pages of story, was turning that into 200 minutes. It doesn't really work. And I remember poor Roger Avery being fired,

taken on as a director. He explained to Warner Brothers. He actually laid on a screening for them of young Schenkmeyer's stop-motion film Alice to show them what he wanted the dreaming to feel like when you were in it and he

was fired and his parking space name was painted out by the time that he left that screening. There were some terrible ones. I can do bad jokes about how terrible they were but they were more terrible than you could possibly imagine that John Peters sort of

helmed in the late 90s. There were a few attempts at making TV shows, none of which really worked because the things that, all of the things that are a feature with taking us to Netflix would have been bugs then, including the budget and including the horror and including just the nature of the story. When you try and turn that into something that you could, you know, show on Fox, you're not really you're neutering you're neutering. You've met the moment

and in many respects, finding the right collaborators behind the camera and also this cast and I want to talk about the cast a bit because it's a remarkable I love my cast as you should and by the nature of the story and the storytelling it has to be

a large ensemble clearly and some episodes you know dream is barely in and others so it's fascinating to see But I want to start with Tom, Tom Sturridge. Yeah. Because that's a challenge. That's a challenging role, to say the least. And talk, do you remember the time when you saw his tape?

Sure. Remember the time when you first saw the dailies of him? I mean, I feel like it's half the job is the cheekbones and the, and the coat. But you see, it isn't. And that's, that was, you make, I love the fact that you've made exactly the same mistake that I made. when we talked about casting I was like it's going to be so easy to cast

we just find you know an English speaking actor with great cheekbones there's loads of them out there and knowing that we could find them we got we saw in the end I believe about 1,500

morphious auditions that means that Lucinda Seisen our casting director probably saw about 6,000 because I know there were a lot that they never sent to us in the first

email from Lucinda it contained four auditions he was the third of the fourth they weren't ranked in any kind of order just his and I watched the four

and so oh Tom Sturridge oh he's really good he says the lines well he's got the whole oh great okay good we can shortlist him and I figured

that at the end of a couple of weeks we'd have a short list of five or ten just as good as him just as right as him just as you could say the lines as well as him and we didn't at the end of a week we had Tom. At the end of two weeks

we had Tom. At the end of a month we had Tom. At the end of six weeks we said to Warner Brothers, it's Tom, isn't it? And they're like, yes, it is Tom. And we said, well, how do we stop him going and getting another job? And Warner's said, we'll pay him not to go and get another job.

Tom, we're just going to give you money not to go and get another job. And Tom's like, okay. So have I got the job? We're like, no, but just please don't go away. And then Netflix were like, oh, have you seen everybody? We're like, we found Tom. Yes, but have you seen everybody? I'm like, no.

So we saw a few more people. Netflix went, okay, maybe it is Tom. And we said, we think it is. And then the pandemic happened. And Netflix said, well, it's probably Tom, but, Given that we can't start shooting for another six months, just make sure you've seen everybody. Have you seen every actor in Australia?

Have you seen every actor in Latvia? And we're like, we have this old Michael Jackson tape, we want you to see. So we saw a lot of Morpheus's, and what I learned from that is that his line's really hard to say. And because we saw some fabulous actors. We saw amazing. It's not like anybody was bad. There was a level, there was a bar that they had to cross in order for us to be watching their video.

Anyway, these were every actor with great cheekbones on the planet of all races, of all nationalities, of everything. And at the end, it was still Tom. And what's weird is mostly, I think, it was the voice. There was something about the way he delivered the lines, the thoughtful way he delivered the lines, the way he'd find the poetry and the beauty and the tune of the lines. the way he'd take lines that were just you know I mean a lot of the time we didn't even have all of the scripts written so we just were giving him you know pages of the comic

typed out to audition with and stuff and it was wonderful it was right and it was that and from that point on you know it was Tom all the way I gave him precisely one note which I got to go down to the set

and this was really in the first couple of days of shooting here we just started shooting it's just begun I'm down there. I'm seeing the undercroft where he's going to be kept prisoner. And Tom and I do a little interview together, meeting him for the first time. And I say to him, I'm so pleased because for the last three decades, people have been expecting

to meet Morpheus and they meet me and they're disappointed. And now... You can point him in that direction. And now they can meet you. And they'll be disappointed. but they won't be disappointed with me it'll be great but I said to him

you know I said and I took him to one side he said look I have just one note for you and he said yeah what's that and I said don't do Batman right because he was just it was his first couple of days and he was just getting a little bit

and it's just like no yet and he said what should I be doing I said, the thing you did on every audition. He said, what? When I was just talking, I said, yes, that, we liked that. That thing you do where you talk. Do that. Just don't do the voice.

You don't have to Batman. He was like, okay. I can do that. So, yes. Speaking of your cast, we have a video question that has come in for you. Okay. References a bit of your cast. Can we roll this tape, please, from Mr. Neil Gaiman.

Hi. My name is Pat and Oswald. I'm a comic book fan and a huge Sandman fan. My question for Mr. Gammon is how come in Spider-Man No Way Home? Thomas Hayden Church just had the one scene when you see him not in Sandman form. Was there like script problems? or with the same main character, he's one of my favorite characters. Thank you for asking. Thank you. Thank you for answering my question, Mr. Gammond. Thank you. Thank you so much for your question, Oswald.

Ozzy, as I'm henceforth going to call you. You know, from... What I love about that is you would not think that from that video, that Patton Oswald, 29 years ago, no, 30 years ago, was standing in line to get his copy of Season of Miss signed at the hardcover at Comics Experience and DeVisidero in San Francisco, but he was there in that line and would show him. up afterwards at signings and events.

And I got to meet him properly, I think, for the first time at a reading I did for the comic book Legal Defense Fund at a restaurant called The Stinking Rose in Los Angeles, where he told me that he was an up-and-coming comedian. And I told him that, you know, I did the good luck. Keep thrusting away and you'll get there in the end. That means all of us in 29 years are going to be in one of your children. 29 years. Everyone's going to be making fun of me on the screen. Speaking about the larger ensemble,

some of the joys are unusual castings related to what you would expect from the comic. Gender swapped roles. Joanna Constantine, played by the Amazing Jenna Coleman. That one was so much fun. That one is weird because perhaps it says something about how dense I am, I never expected any kind of pushback, upset, or anything on that one. It literally never occurred to me. The way David and Alan and I sitting around a table going, you know, we've got John Constantine in episode three, we've got Lady Joanna showing up,

she'll be in there for a little scene in Men of Good Fortune we're then going to bring her back in for Thermidor she's got to be on the run in Revolutionary France why don't we just make her give her

the John Constantine role so that you know it just seemed to make sense we'll get a better class of actor we can you know somebody will get to come back three times and that's just more fun for serialized television and it just made complete sense that we do that so we did it and and only after i did

it after it had happened did we discover that there was now a moratorium on using john constantine anyway because that had sort of happened while because they've got a constantine series in development so you couldn't have to use the character anyway so it was like oh well that That was really, that was useful. Yeah. And then suddenly having people turn around and going, ah, you have done a woke gender swap on us. And we're like, no, we're just sort of,

we're being economical. We had this character already, this character that I had made up in early 1989. And they were like, there's an awful lot of, I am a comics fan, and I know there is no such person as Joanna Constantine, like, here. also here's her mini series you know she came out

I she was really fun to cast and for by really fun I'm in a complete pain in the neck in that we got every fabulous British actress you know people I'm like enormous fans to read and it didn't work and then we started started feeling desperate and I remember suggesting Jenna Coleman and our casting director

saying isn't she too young and I'm like no she used to be too young right but you see the way it were time has been moving forward and I think we've got we at least test her and Jenna who was I think in Thailand or somewhere shooting something did it with her taping you know did tested a scene with her having taped all of the conversation with herself and stuff and sent it in it's like oh yeah there we go that's the thing that's what we wanted that's that

that's the voice that's the attitude there is the doomed person that you will love and admire yet they will be doomed it might be greedy to talk about this at this point and we'll get to the future later on but you know we don't know for sure if there'll be a second season but

let's hope we hope but there's also you know not to be greedy but spin-offs? I mean, would you want to see that character, for instance, get her own series? Oh, God, yes. Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine it happening

in a world in which HBO's Constantine, or possibly Constantine, happens. That differentiates it. That's the pronunciation. Exactly. But if that didn't happen, or if the world, you know, if it worked, I would love to.

I can think of nothing that would be more fun. than watching Jenna Coleman battling demons across London and having doomed love affairs and things. It's all, you know, she's wonderful. She's so funny and doomed. So, yeah, she was so much fun to cast. The, you know, Canaan Abel. I loved casting Canaan Abel, mostly because that was one of those really easy ones.

Asim Chowdry, it's like, oh, yeah, there's Abel. That was easy. Let's talk about the surprise that you gave us all a couple days ago, which was, yes. Not just a bonus episode, but two phenomenally told stories, Dream of a Thousand Cats and Calliope. So, as I understand it, this was baked into the concept from the get-go. Why in this way, were there other permutations of how to do this? just give me a little bit of the sense of how this came together. Okay, so the original, original plan,

as David and I and Alan sat around that dinner table, we really did hash out, I mean, it was just, this is the plan. The plan at the dinner table that night, over sushi, somewhere in Los Angeles, was, we'll do 10 episodes, and then because the second season won't be, it'll take two years to get to the screen the way that these things work. We should have, we'll have an episode that will drop after a year

just to remind people that we still exist. So that was the original idea. So that was when we came up with the first concept of we'll do, and we'll do Dream of a Thousand Cats and we'll do Calliope. And also we figured that the animation on Dream of a Thousand Cats was going to take a lot longer than it actually did. We knew that it would take a long time. But we thought, okay, if we're going to get it fully animated,

it's going to be a very, very long process. So we like the idea of an extra year. But it did mean that they were some of the first scripts that got written. And Dream of a Thousand Cats could get started on right from the get go. And somewhere in there, we started realizing that actually Dream of A Thousand Cats was going to get finished significantly earlier than we had thought it would, which was part of it, and that Calliope, you know, we shot Calliope and we just wanted people to see it. We did not want to lead people around for a year on that. so by the time it was shot we were definitely talking about

going okay let's release it we've still got it and it still doesn't feel like we should drop 1 to 11 still feels like we drop 1 to 10 because 10 is the end of the season 11 feels like

this is what this is now now we've taken you to hear the door is opening and this is These are the kind of lands we can take you to. We managed to keep it a secret. Everybody was really, really good about making sure they kept the secret except me.

I was rubbish. Not only did I tweet the book cover for, Here Comes a Candle, about 14 months ago, but I also tweeted and replied to somebody asking me about cats that we have, we started casting the cats yesterday or something like that. But that wasn't the worst of it.

The worst of it was San Diego Comic Convention a month ago, or a bit less. I'm sitting there with some journalists, with Alan Heinberg at a table, and the question comes about casting and who we cast and how we got them and people we had cast that we had worked with before.

And so I started listing the people, that I'd worked with before. And I'm talking about people and I'm listing cast, I'm listing cast, and then I take a deep breath and I say, and then Sir Derek Jacoby, and Alan Heimberg, it gave me the kind of look

that is the look equivalent of I'm kicking you under the table. And I said, Sir Derek Jacobi isn't in Sandman, but I really hope he will be. And that was, A totally normal thing to say.

Totally normal thing to randomly say. I thought they're going to pick up on that. Obviously, everybody was under stress, and nobody did. There is reference to Orpheus to Dream and Clivey's child in the episode. And I think one of your collaborators has said that that character would factor into season two and that there's a casting in mind. Alan Heinberg has said that, yes. and I, who I'm so good at accidentally letting cats out of the bag,

have nothing at all to say about any of that. Does the actor know that they are? No actors know. None of the actors. There are several actors. I mean, you know, it is the worst thing about knowing that we have season two coming up because I will, I'll go to the theater. I'll go, oh, look up their biography.

Send a little text to it. Alan Heimberg. What about so-and-so for such and such part? Getting back saying noted. Can you say how prominent Orpheus would play a role in season two? No. That's fair. I mean, I can't basically, honestly, the answer to everything

is it's an awful lot like the comics. Just like season one. Yeah. The answer is we don't always take exactly the same route to get to the same place that we did in the comics. Sometimes, you know, you may get a little more than you were expecting. I love the fact that we got to bring Boyd Holbrook in much more as the Corinthian. But he's so good.

But part of the joy of that was because we got to use Sandman Overture as a starting point where you discover that Morpheus was on his way to close down the Corinthian when he got pulled away. So we just used that, basically. And then knowing that we had the Corinthian there, we got to go, okay, well, why not just thread him through the story? And what about taking these kind of creative swings like animation? I mean, because this now proves,

I mean, the reception to this episode in particular has been fantastic. Yep. are there other approaches outside of traditional live action that you would want to experiment with? Honestly, as long as Netflix are good with us, you know, writing us the check to keep going, we will keep going and we will continue to reinvent the ways that we're doing things. I'm really excited about some of the stuff that we've planned for season two. We have, I mean, we really have planned how we're going to do season two. And it's an awful lot of fun because we're taking some of the short stories

and building them into the body of the main thing. And we're taking, we've got ways. of flowing from one storyline into the next storyline that we didn't necessarily have. So it's built and it's shaped and it's constructed. And we're already talking about things like, you know, places that you could use different kinds of animation. Would we want to use animation again? It's really expensive.

Yes. I mean, it cost us a lot. lot of money for that 16 minutes. People are coming to me and saying, whoa, could you do the whole thing animated? It's like, yes, I could. If somebody wanted to give us half a billion dollars, we could absolutely do the whole thing animated. But there are definitely ways that you can go, okay, well, how would we do picking one at random? Ramadan. How do you do Ramadan to make it feel fairy tale and to distinguish the layers of story. And would we look at doing that animated? Would we look at doing it, you know, other ways to combine people with animation or

people with paintings that you could push into a different kind of place? And the answer is I don't know, but we're really keen on finding out. One other question I do have about Calliope in particular, and it's one of my favorite episodes, is a lot has been made about the restraint, frankly, in how it's depicted. And it's really, it's refreshing in a time where, you know, we've been inundated for decades with these depictions of sexual assault and explicitly so. And it's really, for those of you that haven't seen it yet, you know, this is about a muse that is abused and and but what is shown on screen is so minimal and and yet tells everything you need to know in a way is that it's not correcting a mistake of what you did but it but it but it is it is

reflecting the times that we're in now it reflects the times um I was worried I mean I was really concerned because and my biggest concern was if we were telling too little, it would make Rick Maddock too sympathetic. Right. So it's a weird kind of line that you're walking where I wanted the audience not to ever go, well, he's not that bad. I mean, he kept you in a room and would go in and offer a chocolate sometimes. I mean, what is the problem here?

You know, I didn't want that. And I was definitely concerned that people would not see it. And I was so relieved that they did. And I was so relieved. It's like, okay, that one scratch on his face and people go, she fought back, this is what he did when he went into that room. This is what happened. It's like, good.

And I felt like it was, always a, it was always going to be a struggle to depict assault without depicting it. And, you know, and I watched, it was some of the, one watched Game of Thrones struggling with failing, you know, and you're going, well, your heart's in the right place, but the rest of you is really in the wrong place on some of this stuff. Yeah. So. I asked you to select some of your favorite scenes and I feel badly we were already running out of time,

but I want to show at least one of them. This is from episode four, I believe, and highlights yet another amazing cast member, the great Gwendolyn Christie. Let's take a look at this scene between Tom and Gwendolyn. Hello, Dream. Greetings to your Lucifer Morning Star.

And to you, Mazakino the Lillim. Greetings, Dream Lord. you look well dream are you well and your family destiny death despair and the others i presume the ruler of hell knows this is no social call have you come to join forces then to ally your realm to ours to acknowledge the sovereignty of hell you know my feelings on that Lightbringer. Feeling has changed. Especially when one has been caught and imprisoned by mortals.

We expected better of you, sweet Morpheus. I have come because my helm of state was stolen from me. I believe one of your demons has it. I should like it back. Now. Dream. If only it were that easy. But there are.

rules, you see. Protocols which must be followed. Which demon has your helm? Name it and we will bring it here. I confess I do not know the name. Then we will have to summon all of them. There now, Dream, you may inquire, which demon has your helmet? Shall we interview them one at a time, or? It won't be necessary. And I hope you noticed in that an actor called, I think it's Oswald Patterson, in that little, in the little bird suit, he plays Matthew and they squeeze him in the... It's remarkable. He's the Daniel Day Lewis of our time. I mean, there are so many aspects of that we could discuss. I mean, just we haven't even discussed, like, just the incomprehensibility of how we create all, how you guys created all these different realms, Gwendolyn's performance. But, What strikes you about that when you see a tiny part, an amazing part of your vision realized on script?

What I love, you know, the thing that irritated me most, and I think was the reason why I was so much ruder online than I normally am, because I'm normally kind of nice, even with idiots. but when idiots would get grumpy about Gwendolyn Christie being cast as Lucifer and accused me of woke gender swapping and stuff like that and I'm like, I want somebody who can play the most beautiful angel God's most beloved angel who is now a fallen angel and is ruler of hell and convince you

And I want that. And I want, I cast Gwendolyn because I knew that we'd get that. And I cast her because she towers over, well, all of us, but Tom in particular. And I cast her because you were going to get the beauty and you were going to get the majesty and you were going to get that feeling that something inside was broken. and it's all there and it's so gorgeous some questions from our audience, yes

our first question this proves I'm not the only one that's evil and asking about the future seasons they want to know too is there a specific character scene from volume three onwards that you're particularly excited to develop for the screen if the series continues

I you know so much of this is selfish I want to be able to watch three September's in the January. I want to watch, I want to be able to sit there and watch the first cut all the way through. And that one is going to be a really high bar because we got John Lithgow to play it in the Audible version, which is pretty much as good as you could ever hope to get. So whoever is going to play our Norton, our Emperor Norton, is going to have to be as good as John Wethke. This member of the audience wants to know, we're getting deep here.

They've always wondered, what do you think happens after death, Neil Gaiman? I've always subscribed to the Peter Pan theory of death, where when talking about death, Peter says it would be an awfully big adventure. what do you dream neal um i am like most people i think you know i dream those normal kind of dreams where you're being pursued through endless corridors of eternal castles by creatures whose faces are composed of spaghetti and um just trying to find you and wherever you hide you know, the rats come. Wow. Isn't that what, I mean.

Yeah, I mean. You're expecting something less interesting. But mostly I dream, mostly I dream, have dreams with houses in. And buildings and rooms and rooms, rooms with rooms

inside rooms. You know, I tend to do that thing in dreams a lot where I will be in a room that I know or a room I grew up in and I will discover that there was a serving hatch or a cupboard with another room inside it and head on in and just keep going in. Has this changed your relationship to this material? As you said, you wrote this initially. You're a man in your mid-late 20s. You're not that man now. It's been a little time. I mean, these are, in many ways, some of the same stories, some of the same words, some of the same characters.

But you're at a different stage in your life. It must have a different resonance to you. It does. I'm often reminded of Lou Reed. I remember interviewing Lou when I would have been in my early 30s, and he was talking about songs he had written in his late teens or his 20s. and singing them in his, what would he have been, late 40s, 50s, and how they would take him by surprise, because young Lou had said something

that he couldn't possibly have known, that old Lou has now discovered is true, and that would be, and I get that, I get those moments, and how did you know? You were callow, you were, you were, young you were a baby but you knew this thing and actually you were right so um and also a lot of going oh you smug it you know as as there are definitely times when we so many times where we would try and fix things or change things or come up with brilliant ideas i had a brilliant idea

for men of good fortune which was like such a brilliant idea I'm so relieved he never did it it was my brilliant idea was to get the last because going okay we've got the like

what's going to happen in 2020 and I was going well why don't we do something really exciting with Hobb he could have been like captured by people who've noticed that he's immortal and Morpheus would actually have to bust him out it would be like a reverse

of morphia. I was, you know, it's like, no, he just turns up in the pub and says I'm late. Just like he did in the comic, because that was right. And stop being idiot. You know, I ain't broken. Why does Marvel and DC not consult you on their films? I don't know. I mean, nobody knows many, you've written a lot of these characters. You know story and myth and archetypes as well as any human being alive. Do they bring you in? Does Kevin Feigey have a text thread with you, like anything? No, I mean, Kevin and I've spoken a few times over the years on things.

I think the only one that I wish, although the odds are probably the way, I think the way they did it commercially was probably better than, you know. But I remember back in 2007, having minimalist conversations with Kevin Feige about, you know, what about Dr. Strange? and then talking to Guillermo D'Oro and Guillermo and I having these ideas about Dr. Strange and starting the beginning of the, me starting the beginning of the conversation with Kevin

just saying, I could do Dr. Strange with Guillermo. And basically they said, we just want to concentrate on the core characters right now. Dr. Strange is way up the line. We don't want to go there. Wait, you have to give me a little more. What was your take? What was your approach?

What was... There were some cool things in it. My favorite thing, my favorite Dr. Strange thing was the idea of, the one thing that we really wanted to do was have his adventures, have him become an alcoholic and a disbarred physician and all that sort of stuff, happen in the 1920s. So the idea is that, He went through all of that and the training

to become the world's greatest magician maybe in the early 30s, late 20s. And he's been living in Greenwich Village for 90 years looking the same in his place and nobody really notices that this is the master of... And we just sort of liked that idea. And he would have been sort of out of time. And other than that, it would have just been very sort of...

Steve Dicko. because, you know, that's the best. I did notice you were thanked in the credits to Eternals. Is that simply because you had a run that they probably looked at, or did you talk to Chloe or anything? No, I never got to talk to them about it. That was just because they

took some of the ideas from the story that I did. I felt weird with the Eternals. I wished, I wanted to love it, and I kept going, this, they either should have made a

fabulous 85-minute action-minute movie or they should have made a 10-part TV show. They should have done what we did with Sandman and just made big budget thing covering the whole of human history, showing the Eternals getting in there. But trying to try to do everything that they did in the time that they did it, I thought was a slight missed opportunity. Finally, for the last 30 plus years you've been asked about when is Sandman going to reach the bigger small screen? I have.

They can't ask... I know, it's brilliant! What should we start asking you about now? Obviously whether or not we can get the Muppets Sandman off the ground. If the, you know, if the DC Marvel thing, if Disney can come in, And do a...

That's the first thing to do. I don't know, what's next? Probably, people will find another question. You know, I suspect that the next question, especially if we do get a second season, is going to be so

death the high cost of living. When do we get more death? People are already in love with Kirby. Right. You know, again, that was the same. It's the same thing on me getting grumpy online. I got so grumpy at people who are like, aha, yes, you have cast a black woman as death.

It's like, no, I've cast the only person I saw in 600 auditions who could get me to believe. And we got, there were supermodels, there were famous actress, there were fabulous people auditioning, and none of them could actually get that line out about being the most pathetic excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane

and have you believe it and they couldn't do it and then Kirby it's like she just said that line oh my gosh and now she said the super caliphalet she's good oh she's good and it was just that feeling of going oh I yes

if I actually did get hit by that truck crossing the street, you know, somewhere, probably south of Houston, I really would like this. I want this person there saying, you know, you really should have looked both ways before you cross the road. I would like that. She, I can believe her. And so, yeah, probably the next question is going to be, when are we going to get death the high cost of living, I suspect? Don't let those few trolls get you down. 99% of us out there adore this adaptation.

You know, I... The truth is, I don't. And I probably should have... You know, I've spent a year... I've spent years. I've spent decades online being really good at ignoring trolls. I think on this one, there was a certain amount of righteous grumpiness, where I'm like, you people are being performatively grumpy.

about something you don't know anything about and this is this thing that I've been making and I'm incredibly proud of it I think it's really good I think it's worth the three decades that it's taken to bring it to the screen and I also think

that it's probably in its own strange way the most faithful comics adaptation that anybody has managed to bring to the screen yet. So honestly, yeah. Look, I've talked about many projects

in my career that have taken decades and long periods of time to make and like this is the example of the one that met the right moment, the right collaborators. And I'm so happy it happened in this way and I'm so happy that the audience has been there and God willing we're going to get a season two

and death and as much as you guys can make we'll be there for it. Thank you so much for sharing your genius with us tonight. Let's give it up for the one and only Mr. Neil going. Thank you. And so ends another edition of Happy, Sad, Confused. Remember to review, rate, and subscribe to this show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm a big podcast person. I'm Daisy Ridley, and I definitely wasn't pleasure to do this by Josh. I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times. And I'm Paul Shear, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters. We love movies, and we come at them from different perspectives. Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't. He's too old.

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dude, too, is overrated. It is. Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspool, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits. Fan favorites, must-season, and case you missed them. We're talking Parasite the Home Alone. From Greece to the Dark Night. We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks. We've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look.

And we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of like Ganges and Hess. So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcast. And don't forget to hit the follow button. Thank you.