AFTER THREE DECADES OF FAILED ATTEMPTS, NEIL GAIMAN’S SEEMINGLY UNFILMABLE FANTASY-EPIC SAGA THE SANDMAN IS FINALLY MATERIALISING ON OUR SCREENS. EMPIRE REVEALS HOW IT BECAME A REALITY

WORDS DAN JOLIN

IN 1990, Neil Gaiman strode into a meeting with Warner Bros. and instructed them not to adapt his comic. “Please don’t make a Sandman movie right now. Just… don’t,” he asked. He was 29.

Lisa Henson, vice president of production, was stunned. “Nobody’s ever come into my office before and asked me not to make a movie,” she told him. But he wouldn’t budge.

The Portsmouth-born comic-book author explained that he was so embroiled in his long-form creative vision (the series, co-created with artists Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg, would run to 75 issues), a movie would be an unwelcome distraction. His publisher, DC Comics, had sent him to meet Henson, but, he thought, this was the wrong time for an adaptation. A terrible idea. “Just let me do my thing,” he said to Henson. “Okay,” she shrugged, “we won’t make a Sandman movie!”

During the following decades, there were further attempts to turn Gaiman’s spiralling metaphysical masterpiece — concerning the travails of Morpheus, aka Dream, the gothy personification of the universe’s subconscious — into popcorn entertainment. Director Roger Avary had a try that stalled in 1996, before infamous producer Jon Peters got his hands on it (“There were scripts with giant mechanical spiders that made no sense,” shudders Gaiman of the Peters era).

Later, James Mangold came close to realising an HBO series. Then executive producer David S. Goyer, a fan of The Sandman since Issue 1, came even closer with a movie script written by Jack Thorne that Gaiman describes as “fabulous”.

But still The Sandman slipped through its adaptors’ fingers. It was just too, well, much.

“The Sandman is a story about storytelling,” says Allan Heinberg, co-writer of Wonder Woman and such TV shows as Sex And The City and Gilmore Girls. He discovered the comic in college, and it inspired him to pivot from acting to writing. “It is such an inclusive story, in that it incorporates mythologies and folktales and Shakespeare and Chaucer and all of these things.” It takes us back in time, visits Hell, guest-stars Norse gods and weaves in Greek myth, as well as introducing Dream’s ‘Endless’ siblings: Destiny, Desire, Despair, Delirium…