Joseph Gordon-Levitt is working to make his dream of a “Sandman” movie a reality.

The 33-year-old actor and filmmaker recently discussed his progress on an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s acclaimed DC comic about the melancholic lord of dreams while promoting “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.”

“Right now we’re working on a script,” Gordon-Levitt told Moviefone. “It’s me and [David S.] Goyer and the screenwriter [Jack Thorne] and Neil Gaiman, as well as the good folks at DC and Warner Bros. It’s a really cool team of people. It’s a lot of the same people who worked on the [Christopher] Nolan ‘Batman’ movies. It’s really exciting.”

Gordon-Levitt is producing “Sandman” with Goyer, a writer and producer whose credits include Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy, Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” and the upcoming “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” Thorne, a British screenwriter, penned “A Long Way Down” and “The Scouting Book for Boys.”


Gordon-Levitt may also direct and star in the film, which is to tell the story of the brooding hero Morpheus, the immortal personification of dreams.

Gaiman’s “Sandman” mythos is a sprawling, literary and indeed dreamlike one, and its inherent challenges have stymied numerous previous attempts at adaptation. Gordon-Levitt has acknowledged as much.

“There’s not a script yet, we’re still kind of working it out because it’s such a complicated adaptation because ‘Sandman’ wasn’t written as novels,” he told Moviefone. “‘Sin City’ was written as a novel. ‘Sandman’ is 75 episodic issues. There’s a reason people have been trying and failing to adapt ‘Sandman’ for the past 20 years.”

He added, “We’re still in the middle of it, so I don’t want to make any claims, but I think we’ve got the right ideas.”


Gordon-Levitt’s “Sandman” update comes as Warner Bros. and DC Comics are gearing up for a series of 10 upcoming superhero movies (including “Batman vs. Superman”) scheduled through 2020.

Follow @ogettell for movie news