David Remnick: I'm David Remnick.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. There are about 193 countries in the world. In 89 of them the Sandman is the most popular show on Netflix.

David Remnick: This is the Neil Gaiman show, of course, based on his comic series. I have to admit, Ngofeen, 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?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: His books ask readers to trust him and step into this new world. 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 unspools from there, or the story Coraline or the series American Gods. There's just so many stories that are filled with these fantastical tales that are really great.

David Remnick: How involved was he in the new Netflix Adaptation of Sandman?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: 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 with 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 cannon.

Morpheus: We begin. In the waking world which humanity insists on calling the real world, as if your dreams have no effect upon the choices you make.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: I want to take you back to December of 1988, where were you in your life? What happened or was about to happen?

Neil Gaiman: 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.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Okay. Oh, wow.

Neil Gaiman: Black Orchid, number one. 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. 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. In front of us, we have piles of Sandman one. We have about 13, maybe 14 young men between the ages of 16 and 22 waiting for us to sign stuff and we sign stuff for them, and then that was it. That was our Sandman number one, signing. As big events go it wasn't.

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 exclusive email, and probably by year three, they were 50% female. 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 bookstore had not seen a woman. You bring them in, you do Sandman. Let me shake your hands, man."

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Can you explain just the premise of Sandman and who the main character Morpheus is and what his domain is like?

Neil Gaiman: Of course. The premise of Sandman is that there is a place that you go every night, when you close your eyes fast asleep, you are actually visiting a place called the dreaming and the dreaming is ruled by Morpheus the King of dreams.

Morpheus: I, the Lord Morpheus dream of the endless. Summon the fates, the three who are one, the one who is three. The [unintelligible 00:05:16].

Speaker 5: Morpheus, it's been a while. You look thin, love. Are you eating? Are you hungry?

Speaker 6: Yes, but not for food. Look at him. He wants something.

Morpheus: You have found me out. I do want something. I need your help.

Speaker 5: Help?

Neil Gaiman: About 106 years ago, he was captured by a British [unintelligible 00:05:52] and imprisoned in a glass globe in a basement and prepared to outlive and out-weight, his captors. 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.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: One of the things that I love about your writing is that for me, it feels like I get into a plane, and then it like takes me up really, really high. There's just so much space and so much room to imagine. It just feels like even the way that you describe it, it's like you could say the premise of Sandman is about dreaming and dreams, but you 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 on. Do you think that there are ways to bring that like, I don't know if we call it fantasy or fantastical or roominess or space into nonfiction, can we bring that roominess into like what we consider factual?

Neil Gaiman: I think we have to. The concept of suspension of disbelief is a fascinating one for me and it continues to be 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. 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 6, of Sandman, I took Kirby, Howell-Baptiste who plays Death aside. Here we are, we're at the San Diego comic convention. I said to Kirby, "Look, it certainly 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. Let me just tell you now that for 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. I watched you in that episode, the sound of her wings, meeting people as death-

Ngofeen Mputubwele: As death?

Neil Gaiman: -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, 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 for 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. 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?" The person says, "Oh, it's two blocks over." The concept of the city block has not yet arrived in London. The idea that it would've arrived there in the 17th century with the tangle of London streets is impossible.

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. I think that for journalism, for fiction, for non-fiction alike, the most important thing is just trying to cultivate trust. 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

Ngofeen Mputubwele: At some point in the series, we go to hell.

Lucifer: Tell us why should we let you leave? Helmet or no, you have no power here. After all what power of dreams in hell?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: I wonder if you could just describe that domain?

Neil Gaiman: Well, hell in the Sandman was very much inspired by Dante's Inferno. It is a place where you get things like the wood of suicides and each wood, 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 Morningstar. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. Lucifer is absolutely down for reigning in hell.

Speaker 8: [unintelligible 00:12:59]

Ngofeen Mputubwele: 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?

Neil Gaiman: 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's actually quote from somebody called the [unintelligible 00:13:49] and he said, "I have to believe in hell because it is church doctrine that there is a hell. I under no obligation to believe that there is anybody there."

I loved that. That for me was the primary building block of hell. 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. The idea of hell is a place of punishment. The idea that, at one point Lucifer says, tends to Morpheus and says, "Well, you have no power here. What power has dreams in hell?" He says, 'What power would hell have if those who are imprisoned here could not dream of heaven?"

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 kinds 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?"

Ngofeen Mputubwele: The 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 a small crowd of people. How is the Neil Gaiman of 2022 different than the Neil Gaiman of '88?

Neil Gaiman: 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. All these 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. He, as a 28-year-old was going, "I want to write my name on the wall and I want to make good stuff." I think if I just keep making good stuff sooner or later, my name will have been written on the wall. I'd love to be able to go back in time and tell him, "I think he was probably right."

Speaker 4: Neil Gaiman talking with our producer Ngofeen Mputubwele. The Sandman adapted from the game in series of graphic novels is out on Netflix.

[00:17:35] [END OF AUDIO]

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