The New Yorker Radio Hour - Neil Gaiman on the Power of Fantasy in our Lives

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

Neil Gaiman, one of the great fantasy writers of our time, first started writing his comic series “The Sandman” in the nineteen-eightiess. Decades later, a TV adaptation is a huge hit on Netflix, topping the platform’s charts in countries across the globe. Gaiman talks with the producer Ngofeen Mputubwele about the powerful role that fantasy can play in helping audiences process real experiences in their lives. “You’re making things that aren’t true,” he says, “and you’re giving them to people in order to allow them to see—we hope—greater truths.” Though the Netflix début marks a major expansion of “The Sandman” ’s visibility, the series has long attracted audiences beyond ardent comic fans. Looking back to the early success of his comics, Gaiman recalls, “I would go to conventions and large, sweaty gentlemen would come over to me, grab my hands and say, ‘You brought women into my store. . . . Let me shake your hand.’ ” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And I'm Gauphin Putubuele. There are about 193 countries in the world. In 89 of them, The Sandman is the most popular show on Netflix. So this is the Neil Gaiman show, of course, based on his comic series. I have to admit, O'Fennan, I don't follow fantasy that closely. But Neil Gaiman's got a huge list of really successful. books. I don't think there's anyone even close to him in the genre right now. What draws you to his work?

His books ask readers to trust him and step into this new world, and then the world always delivers. I think one of my favorites is his story, The Graveyard Book, where this baby, his parents are killed, and then he gets adopted by ghosts in a graveyard, and the story sort of unspools from there, or the story Coraline or the series American Gods. There's just so many stories that are kind of filled with these fantastical tales that are really great. How involved was he in the new Netflix adaptation of Sandman? Super involved, which is one of the things that's very cool about it. This is not the situation where the author says, I'm selling the rights and hopefully they don't mess it up.

He was getting dailies, like the shots of what they recorded every day. He helped on the script. He helped with casting. He was very, very involved. And I think that the result is something that is as expansive and dreamy as the rest of his canon. We begin which humanity insists on calling the real world, as if your dreams have no effect upon the choices you make. I want to take you back to December of 1988.

Where were you in your life? What happened or was about to happen? I had just turned 28 years old. I'd been 27 that year. And my first DC comic had been published about a month before, six weeks before. Okay. Black Orchid number one. And now, Sandman,

number one is coming out. I go to America. I come to New York where I meet Mike Dringenberg, who is the artist, and I met Mike for the first time there. And the two of us went out to Jim Hanley's universe on Staten Island, if memory serves, to do a comic book signing. And in front of us, we have piles of Sandman 1. We have about 13, maybe 14 young men between the ages of 16 and 22. Okay, okay. Waiting for us to sign stuff and we signed stuff for them. And then that was it.

That was our Sandman number one signing. As big events go, it wasn't. And what I love is looking back on it as Sandman signings became bigger and bigger, but also became more and more inclusive. There was the point somewhere in year two where I realized that the lines were no longer exclusively male. And probably by year three, they were 50% female. and around that point, I would go to conventions and large, sweaty gentlemen would come over to me, grab my hands and say, you bought women into my store. My comic book store had not seen a woman.

You bring them in. You do Sam, man. Let me shake your hands, man. So can you explain just the premise of Sandman and who the main character, Morpheus, is, and what his domain is like. Of course. So the premise of Samman is that there is a place that you go every night when you close your eyes fast asleep. You're actually visiting a place called The Dreaming.

And the Dreaming is ruled by Morpheus, the King of Dreams. Summon the Fate. Morpheus. It's been a while. You look thin, love. Are you eating? Are you hungry? He is, but not for food.

Look at him. He wants something. You've found me out. 106 years ago, he was captured by a British occultist and imprisoned in a glass globe in a basement. And prepared to, outlive and outweighed his captors. And eventually, he escaped and discovered that his realm was in ruins. Our dreams have been partly ruined and powerful dreams had escaped into the waking

world. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. One of the things that I love about your writing is that it feels so for me it feels like I get into a plane and then it like takes me up really, really high and there's just so much space and so much like room to imagine. It just feels like there's so much like even the way that you describe it. It's like you could you could say the premise of Sandman is about dreaming and dreams. But you know, you kind of like spin this beautiful tale and it makes me think like, wow, I want to soak up this world. I know that you did some journalism early, early on. Do you think that there are ways to bring that sort of like, I don't know if we call it fantasy or fantastical or ruminous or space into nonfiction? Can you, can we bring

that sort of roominess into like what we consider factual? I think we have to. do. The concept of suspension of disbelief is a fascinating one for me. And it continues to be sort of the thing that I look at and go, well, this is my engine. This is my place. My job is to make you believe in something that is not true and did not happen to people who do not exist. And to make you care about those people and those things that did not happen that I'm just making up. And if I do my job correctly, to send you back into your life, feeling different, feeling like you've experienced something that you haven't experienced before, maybe even seeing the world a little bit differently.

Episode six of Sandman, I took. Look, Kirby, Hal Baptiste, who plays death aside. You know, here we are, we're at the San Diego Comic Convention. And I said to Kirby, look, it suddenly occurs to me that I should have told you this a year ago. I should have told you this when we were shooting this. I should have warned you before you took the part. And I didn't. So let me just tell you now that for the first of,

the rest of your life, people are going to come up to you and say, my son died, my daughter died, my grandfather died, my husband died, my lover died, my friend died, somebody that I cared about died. And I watched you in that episode, the sound of her wings, meeting people. As death. as death and it let me cope. I've been having people coming up to me for 30 years

saying your death got me through this. There is a real in terms of suspension of disbelief. It's you're telling things, you're making things that aren't true. You're making these big, roomy things with space that are not true and you're giving them to people

in order to allow them to see, we hope, greater truths. What fascinates me is that suspension of disbelief is incredibly fragile, and it will pop on tiny things, and it pops in the same way on as fiction as nonfiction. You know, I remember reading an otherwise wonderful book in which somebody time travels back to the 17th century. They're in London, and they say, excuse me, where is such and such street? And the person says, oh, it's two blocks over. And the concept of the city block has not yet arrived in London.

The idea that it would have arrived there in the 17th century with the tangle of London streets is impossible. And from that point on, much as I loved the book, I found it impossible to believe anything or take anything seriously. My suspension of disbelief has now gone. I was walking with you and I have now let go of your hand and I'm looking at you curiously. So I think that for journalism, for fiction, for nonfiction alike, the most important thing is just trying to cultivate trust and you cultivate trust by a certain accuracy, by just checking your facts. by not telling people things that they know are not true,

because then they're gone. At some point in the series, we go to hell. Tell us, why should we let you leave? Helmut or no, you have no power here. After all, what power of dreams? I wonder if you could just describe that domain. Well, hell in the Sandman was very, very much inspired by Dante's Inferno.

It is a place where you get things like the wood of suicides, and each tree in the wood was once a person who has died by their own hand. People everywhere, people make up the fabric of hell, the walls of hell are made of people. The buildings are made of people and of rocks and of thorns. It's huge, it's expanding, in Blake's phrase, the dark satanic mills, definitely grinding away there. And over it all, ruling it all, is Lucifer Morning Star. Better to rain in hell than serve in heaven.

And Lucifer is absolutely down for raining in hell. You talked about going into that suspension of disbelief, coming out and seeing your world in a slightly different light. What is it that in the Sandman, either you hope people see in a different light or that you yourself saw in a different light at the end of having written it? What fascinated me about hell?

always, I think I was about 11, and somebody asked a biology teacher of mine if he believed in hell. And he quoted somebody, it's actually a quote from somebody called the Abbe Munier, and he said, I have to believe in hell because it is church doctrine that there is a hell. I'm under no obligation to believe that there is anybody there. And I loved that. That for me was sort of the primary building block of hell. And I thought, okay, what if everybody in hell is there? Because on some deep, profound level, they want to be there.

They believe they should be there. they are punishing themselves. That allowed me to begin to build a hell that I could work with in fiction. For me, you don't really write about hell. You write about hell in order to make concrete metaphors and ideas. So the idea of hell is a place of punishment. The idea that, you know, at one point, Lucifer says, turns to Morpheus and says, well, you know, you have no power here.

What power has dreams in hell? And he says, what power would hell have if those who are imprisoned here could not dream of heaven? And that, for me, that's what it's all about. It's like, why build a hell? Well, you build a hell so you can deliver those kind of ideas, so you can take those metaphors, so you can play with those stories and you can actually make people think about them and go, whoa, okay, that's an idea. How does that apply to my life? Last question is in August 2022, your show is number one in 89 countries.

In December of 1988, you're just about to, you're in a bookstore signing to, you know, a small crowd of people. How is the Neil Gaiman of 2022 different than the Neil Gaiman of 88? I'm in some ways the same. I'm still curious and I still love making things. I think he was much more driven than I am, partly I guess because I've done so many of the things that he dreamed of doing. You know, all these sort of things that have mean that I feel like I've actually written my name on the wall and that if I die tomorrow, my name will have been written

on the wall. It may not be written very large or very legibly or even anywhere that people can see it, but I know I wrote it. And he, as a 28-year-old, was going, I want to write my name on the wall and I want to make good stuff. And I think if I just keep making good stuff sooner or later, my name will have been written on the wall. And I'd love to be able to go back in time and tell him, I think he was probably right. Neil Gaiman talking with our producer, Gauphin and Putabwele,

the Sandman adapted from the Gaman series of graphic novels, is out on Netflix. That's our program for today. Next week, get ready, because Jennifer Lewis will be joining us and she's starring in the Showtime series, I love that for you. I'm David Remnick.

Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato

and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Aave Carrillo, Brita Green, Calalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Putubuele. Along with Jeffrey,

Masters, Will Coley, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keith Line and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.