Joseph Gordon-Levitt has finally made some real comments about exactly why he’s decided to get involved with Warner Brothers’ cinematic adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. His reasons are actually pretty interesting. In fact, it’s the particular kind of interesting that makes me very excited for the Sandman movie.
“Well, I love just the basic concept of it – just the concept of personifying Dream, along with all of his brothers and sisters, the seven Endless personifying Death, personifying Destruction and Delirium and Destiny and Desire and Despair. I mean, that’s just a fascinating and, I think, a really cinematic concept. You look at the art of Sandman, and it just looks spectacular. I love big, spectacular movies, but oftentimes big, spectacular movies sort of get stuck in a rut. They go down certain paths that end in big explosions or whatever. Sandman has so much opportunity to do something that’s on a grand, grand scale, but really unlike your average big, grand-scale, spectacular movie. I guess that’s the tip of the iceberg.”
That’s really cool! It’s clear WB wanted to give JGL a shot at something more substantive than his role in The Dark Knight Rises, but his reasons for picking the Sandman movie are excellent. The universe of Sandman is one that can definitely be adapted into a huge movie, but not in the same way that most movies are huge these days. The stakes aren’t exactly arbitrarily huge. In fact in many cases the stakes aren’t entirely clear.
Instead, Sandman depends on the mystical nature of its world to push its story forward, and develop its larger than life characters into relatable figures. The fact that JGL is looking to get into the weird element of this, and not just relying on the effects driven magic as a motivation makes me way more excited about the Sandman movie than I was before.
Source: SlashFilm