Posted in: TV | Tagged: neil gaiman, The Sandman

The Sandman Showrunner: "Death" Drew From, Changed Neil Gaiman Script

The Sandman adaptation of "Death: The High Cost of Living" credited Neil Gaiman as a co-writer because aspects of his film script were used.

Officially released last week, Neil Gaiman was given a co-writer credit on the final bonus episode of The Sandman, which adapts the spinoff miniseries Death: The High Cost of Living. Showrunner Allan Heinberg spoke with Variety and said that Gaiman was not involved in the writing of the episode itself, but they felt honour-bound to give him the credit because they drew from the feature film screenplay he wrote years ago that Guillermo del Toro was going to produce. Heinberg made a major change to the screenplay and original story – he aged up Sexton Furnival (Colin Morgan) and Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) from the teenagers in the comic and feature script to adults in their thirties, which made their story and arc more mature and nuanced.

"When we discovered together that Season 2 would be our last season, Netflix very generously said, 'Why don't you do an additional episode? Like, take the 11 episodes you need to tell the story, and then we'll give you one more.' When you find out what these things cost, it's a very nice gift, indeed," Heinberg said. "So we talked about 'Ramadan.' We talked about, is there a one hour version of prequel story 'Overture'? Both are extremely unwieldy and expensive, and by the end of the season, we probably only had 10 days to shoot this in. And so practical considerations played a part, but Neil had developed a version of Death: The High Cost of Living as a feature with Guillermo del Toro back in, I think, 2010, and so it felt like, 'OK, this is a lift we can handle.' And it felt like a sequel to Episode 6 of Season 1, where Dream and Death are just having a walk around London, and we all love that episode very much."

"I tried to take everything I could from that screenplay," Heinberg said. "Most notably, there are a couple of lines that the cab driver, Lenny, says to Death and Sexton that were right from that movie. And it just felt like, Neil and David Goyer and I had shared credit for the first episode, and it felt like a nice way to go out to share credit with Neil for the last episode. And I committed to doing that when he gave me the screenplay, not knowing how much or how little of it we were going to end up being able to use. In that version of the movie, Death was a teenage girl, Sexton was a teenage boy. So there wasn't a lot that could come with us into making them both adult characters in their 30s."

Heinberg called the bonus episode "a good night kiss to the audience before the show goes to bed. It felt like, if you're grieving the loss of your show, this is exactly the right way to say goodbye to it and remember that even in the face of death, there's so much joy and so much love and so much to appreciate about the time we spend here."

Over the course of more than the past year, Tortoise Media, NY Magazine, and Vulture have reported allegations of abuse by a number of women against Gaiman. Gaiman has denied anything non-consensual. The Sandman is streaming on Netflix.

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