Joseph Gordon-Levitt says Sandman movie won't have any punching

There hasn’t been a lot of news about the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s comic The Sandman since Joseph Gordon-Levitt announced he was producing back in 2013, but at the Guys Choice Awards this weekend, Gordon-Levitt said the movie is slowly but surely moving along.

“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.”

Beginning in 1989, Gaiman’s original series ran for 75 issues, and it follows a mysterious figure known as Morpheus or Dream, among other names. Over the years, there have been many rumors of film and TV adaptations, but the upcoming Warner Bros. film is one of the few to have Gaiman’s blessing and involvement.

“Big spectacular action movies are generally about crime fighters fighting crime and blowing s— up. This has nothing to do with that,” Gordon-Levitt said. “And it was actually one of the things that Neil Gaiman said to me, he said, ‘Don’t have any punching.’ Because he never does. If you read the comics, Morpheus doesn’t punch anybody. That’s not what he does. It’s going to be like a grand spectacular action film, but that relies on none of those same old ordinary clichés. So that’s why it’s taking a lot of time to write, but it’s going to be really good.”

Watch MTV’s full interview with Gordon-Levitt below.

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