While it's been a while, it seemed like the movie adaptation to Neil Gaiman's classic comic character "Sandman" is finally pushing forward.
The project to be headed by "Dark Night Rises' star Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been in development for quite some time already, and while no news as to who will play the "Lord of Dreams" has been reported yet, JGL has given fans an idea on what to expect on the movie during his Reddit AMA.
While purists would be in favor of fully adapting the original story in the comics, Joseph Gordon-Levitt believed that it's better for "Sandman" to be produced in a different level of narrative structure without compromising the "sentiment" of the character.
"There's tons of little brilliant moments throughout the series, and we certainly can't incorporate all of them," he explained.
"We are using a whole bunch of specifics straight from the comics, but of course, we're also having to do a certain amount of invention, and in between that, there's tons of re-appropriating, re-contextualizing, combining, consolidating, and all manner of things that literalists might not like. But what we try to be completely faithful about is the overall sentiment: that Dreams and Stories and Magic are actually all the same thing, and that they're real, and that they're powerful."
And while he acknowledged the improvement of TV's cinematic visualization, he pointed out that the movie adaptation to Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" is far better off on the big screen.
"I think a big screen adaptation is a better idea and here's why," he said of his project.
"If you did the episodic version, I think it could very well end up as a not-as-good-version of what is already brilliant in the comics. But by reworking the material into a big movie, Gaiman's brilliant characters and ideas get to take shape in a way they never have before. Also, I think Sandman deserves to look absolutely mind-blowingly awesome, just on a visual level, and as cinematic as some tv shows are becoming these days, they still can't compete with big movies visually, just because they can't afford to."
And during a previous talk with MTV during Guys Choice Awards, Joseph Gordon-Levitt revealed the progress of the movie, assuring fans that while "it's slow" it's definitely "steady."
"It's slow but steady," he told MTV. "It's a really complicated adaptation because those comics, they're brilliant, but they're not written as a whole. It's not like Watchmen, which is a graphic novel that has a beginning, middle, and end. Sandman was written over the course of whatever, I forget exactly, six or seven years. One at a time. One little 20-page issue at a time. And to try to take that and make it into something that's a feature film - a movie that has a beginning, middle, and end - is complicated."
And while "Sandman" movie is supposedly going to be produced under the distribution of Warner Bros., since it's under DC Comics, Deadline exclusively reported that it has been moved under New Line Cinema.
"Warner Bros-owned DC Comics imprint Vertigo movie titles are going to come under the auspices of New Line Cinema, I'm told. Warner Bros has its hands full with Batman, Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman and all of the other tentpole pictures they are planning from DC titles, and so it would make sense for the Vertigo titles to be steered under Toby Emmerich and Richard Brener. The Vertigo titles are considered subversive compared to the WB-steered DC Comics titles with those venerable superheroes."
