‘The Sandman’-setreportage: de outtakes

Dingen die acteurs en producers van The Sandman hebben gezegd toen ik eind februari 2024 de set van de reeks bezocht , maar die m’n De Morgen-reportage niet hebben gehaald. Sfeerbeelden van de Shepperton Studios-set. Impressies van m’n verblijf in East Molesey, tegenover Hampton Court Palace, op een half uur rijden van Shepperton.

Tom Sturridge (Dream): 

“The way people construct characters is a private thing. It’s a bad magic trick. And the one rule of magic tricks is: you never reveal how you do it. I think having time away from it was also incredibly helpful. There’s something about how time breeds subconscious experience, which, ironically, is what our entire show is about. What’s exciting about this particular character are the different ways that he presents himself, whether it be in a authoritarian position or a private one. There’s a lot of scope.”

Allan Heinberg (Showrunner):

 “I think this office was Tom Cruise’s once. The rumor is that he had the floor raised and the ceiling lowered so he could feel taller in here. I do like spreading it, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

“Today is our last day in the Royal Banquet Hall, where episodes two and three feature the Season of Mists arc from in the Sandman comic. You’ve got representatives from several different realms, all of whom are vying for ownership of Lucifer’s Hell once Lucifer abdicates. Today, we’re seeing the entertainment for the banquet, which is Cain and Abel performing a magic show with Goldie. Lord Susano Ono Makoto is going to have a private conversation with Dream about why he should have the key. The end of the Magic Show, Reaction Shots to the Magic Show. Corazon, the Duke of Hell, whom Dream bested in Season One, is going to see other members of other factions trying to bribe Dream and suggests to his lover, the Merlin, that they bribe Dream as well. She’s going to take him upstairs and seduce him because he doesn’t know that he’s the gift that has been brought to bribe Dream with. And then I guess we have an element shoot of the two angels who’ve come down from heaven to supervise the goings on. So you’ll be in the banquet hall, you’ll see representatives from Faerie, you’ll see the demons from Hell, the Lords of Order, there’s the Lords of Chaos, Shivering Jemmy, and the Chaos Brigade. There’s Lord Susana Onamokodo, who’s a Japanese storm god, and there are the Norse gods, Oden, Thor, and Loki.”

“And that’s today. That’s a lot. That’s every day. That’s a lot.”

“I hear reports from people who are not comic book people that they fell in love with Sandman because of the TV show and went back and read the comics. Which is obviously all you want people to do. We’re always crafting the narrative with an eye toward being faithful to the comics, but almost always with how do we bring as many people to the show and to the story and the characters as possible. We want everybody to get everything. And I think Neil feels that way, too. The material is unusual, and it is dense by its own nature. We’re doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream this year. We’re going back to Elizabethean England, and there’s Shakespeare. For us, we want to present that in a way that is true to Neil’s intent in the comic, but brings everyone with us. We’re constantly trying to find the balance and to include as much from the comic as possible. But also the show dictates what works and what doesn’t. There have been plenty of times where I’ve tried to include too much from the comics, and then you see it in the context of the cut and of the story, and you realize, yeah, nobody’s going to understand this. There have been casualties already. But again, bonus content for the website, and the fans will love it because they can’t see we didn’t try.”

“It’s more of the same in terms of taking an arrogant, honorable, all-seeing, all-knowing deity and humanizing him and teaching him or watching him figure out what it means to be a good sibling, a good husband, a good father. Teaching him compassion. You’ll get to know Dream and his intimate relationships a lot more deeply in season two, especially the family relationships with his brother and his sister, Delirium. He starts to make choices that are emotionally responsible. This is somebody who, when we started, he thought he was the most important being in the universe with the most important job. It’s taken him a minute to realize that other people have other points of view and that his behavior, that he thought it was honorable in the moment, has created all kinds of trouble for people he allegedly cares about. Last season was about realizing he made mistakes, and this season is about trying to make things right and the cost of that. To the point where, if it becomes too dangerous, do you protect yourself or do you protect the people that you love? He has to make that choice in this season again and again and again. When it comes to his ex-lover Nada, when it comes to his sister Delirium, his son Orpheus: these are all people he’s emotionally wronged in the past, and now he has to reckon with how to move forward with all of them. I think it’s a much more personal and intimate and emotional season than last season was. If that makes sense. The family story aspect of it.”

“What Neil does in the book is head-spinning, and the art just allows you to take Neil’s enormous ideas and make them beyond epic scale. But in going back to the book and trying to adapt it, the thing that kept impressing me was how it always comes down to what it means to be human. When we sold the show to Netflix, part of the appeal was that it was essentially a family soap, a relationship drama. I think that’s what we’re calling it. That was surprising, I think, to a lot of people because I thought of Sandman as a big world building show. For me, because that’s my background and that what I’m interested in as a writer, that’s where my eye always is. Then luckily, I’m working with unbelievable HODs, the heads of these departments, who have these epic imaginations and can give us worlds and universes and settings that scratch the edge in terms of building this multidimensional, epic world building fantasy behemoth that it is. But we never rely on the scope and the spectacle in order to tell the story. Jamie Child, our director this season, doesn’t like to rely on CGI. It feels better to him if everything’s in camera. That helps keep us focused on the emotional lives of the characters and what’s going on in the scene. Tom is really good about that as well. We all have the same priorities in that way.”

“Our costume, hair, and makeup department are the hardest working of all. I mean, it is odd. In the same day, you’ll go downstairs and see a clown brigade, there are Demons, there are Norse gods. Two weeks ago, we were in Shakespeare’s England. It all makes sense in my brain, and hopefully in the script, but it is a massive challenge. The demands of the show are ridiculous, beyond ridiculous, and somehow they make it all look gorgeous and easy.”

“When we were pitching Sandman, there have been 30 years worth of abortive attempts to make it. The technology and the budgets have finally allowed us to tell the story in the way that feels true to the comic. Obviously, a lot of it is going to go to VFX and SFX, but mostly it’s just such a lift to try to span all of these eras and with the enormity of the cast. We’ve got 387 speaking roles or something this year, all principal speaking roles. We have two cast members, and then everybody else is a guest star. You couldn’t do that years ago, especially if you think about what TV and movies have been prior to streaming. You’ve got essentially 42-minute network shows with a lot of limitations in terms of subject matter and the way you tell stories. The Sandman could never have existed in that framework. Movies are two hour plus frameworks. You’d have to chop this thing up in ways that I don’t know would make sense or be representative of what the book really is. I would imagine that this long-form storytelling, because of the novelist he is, that’s why streaming is a particularly good format to tell Neil Gaiman’s sized stories. So yes, it’s the technology, but I think it has more to do with the form, to be honest.”

“Everything is, ‘How are we going to do that?’ To some degree or another. How are we going to take Dream and Delirium on a road trip across America when we’re at Shepperton, it’s a little bit like that. How do you shoot Croydon for New York? Last season, we were in Bournemouth for South Florida. We got away with that somehow.” 

Sanjeev Bhaskar (Cain) 

“The characters are pretty clear on the page of the comic books. What you don’t know, what you can’t see, and what you have to imagine, is the relationship. One of the things with us being able to hang out with each other is that you find that tonal thing, which is not necessarily on the page. It’s always about the relationships. When fantasy stories or films are not that connected, it’s never because the special effects weren’t good. It’s because there’s something about the interaction of those characters that didn’t make it feel emotionally viable.”

“The most exciting part of film and television for me is the first time you walk onto a set, because you physically see the craft. Whether it’s statues or arches or if you do a period piece or something, the fact that they found cornflakes packets from 1965 or whatever, it’s extraordinary. It absolutely embeds you in the world in a way that imagining it there will never do as well because it is tangible. The same with costumes and makeup and all the rest of it. I find it extraordinary and overwhelming. It just reminds me that That each of those departments have to be at the top of their game for the end result to be great. There’s nothing like walking onto a set like this to remind me that as an actor, I am nowhere near the most important person on this occasion. Because look at that. You don’t want to let that down when it’s that good.”

Asim Chaudry (Abel)

“On paper, it’s just the biblical story. Cain murders Abel. But actually, there’s a lot of complexities in there about the brotherly relationship and about greed and envy. In this scene today, there’s a bit of comedy in that, that violence with Cain and Abel. There was this great scene that we did in the first season, and I’m climbing out of a grave and I’m talking to Goldie and I’m saying, okay, I’m going, Cain doesn’t mean to murder me. It’s just the way he is. There’s actually parallels of a domestic abusive relationship where the person thinks it’s their fault and they don’t mean to.”

 “But also we are immortal. So even though Cain is killing me and my gut is spilling, we will be back. So that’s the great thing about these characters. As long as Sandman goes, we can’t be cut. We can’t die.”

 “This Hell episode, it’s such a brilliant one. It’s a standalone thing as well. It’s like the keys to Hell. Who’s going to take us? That could be a film. It could be a standalone film. All the different lords and gods and the mythology. Such a rich world where you could come in it to a completely blind, not know anything about Sandman and enjoy it.”

Freddie Fox (Loki)

“I just looked at all the graphic novel images. Looked at the body language that had been drawn in, the physiognomy, the style he had, where he held his hands. I tried to imbue that into my own version of him, whilst also looking at rock stars like Billy Idol and Johnny Rotten and David Bowie, and finding out which Bowie he is.”

“The feel and the colors are certainly of the comics, and yet there’s a svelte blackness to it which I think works very well on camera. So much of the lighting is doing a lot of the tone of the graphic and creating that color palette.”