Neil Gaiman on 'Dr Who', 'Sandman'

Digital Spy
Award-winning fantasy author Neil Gaiman has picked up a legion of fans over the years thanks to works like The Sandman comic series, his American Gods novel and the television series Neverwhere. We caught up with him in London while he was promoting new animated movie Coraline, based on his book, and managed to sneak in a couple of extra curricular questions about those Doctor Who and Sandman rumours...

There have been rumours that Steven Moffat has asked you to write a Doctor Who story for next year's series...
"I've definitely heard those rumours too. I keep getting asked about it in the strangest places. Last year I got a message saying, 'your daughter's Visa card has been declined and you have to call Visa and sort it out'. So I phoned Visa and the guy said 'are you THE Neil Gaiman?' and I said 'yeah'. He said 'are you writing an episode of Doctor Who?' Strange places. Oddly enough, and delightedly, Steven Moffat came to the screening last night of Coraline."

What's the status of the proposed Sandman movie?
"The last thing that I heard was that HBO wanted to do an ongoing, great big Sandman overarching HBO TV series, which would make sense because they're part of the Time Warner empire and Sandman cannot leave Time Warner. Whether or not that will ever happen I do not know, because it would involve HBO making a deal with DC [Comics] which they may or may not be capable of doing. The truth is they are things in my life that I do not own, that I've created but do not own and do not control. What gets really frustrating is people assume that I do and they assume I'm consulted and can say yes or no to things - which of course I can't.

"It's like the Death movie. If I owned the character of Death and owned that story there would have been a film 12 years ago, because Miramax wanted to do it, were willing to pay for it there and then. But Time Warner was not willing to let the material go over to Disney in case it was a hit for them. So you wind up in this weird world with that stuff."