For decades, celebrated writer and director Dirk Maggs has helmed audio dramas of both original works and adaptations of stories from other mediums, including comic books. Among Maggs' most acclaimed collaborations are his adaptations of the works of bestselling author Neil Gaiman, including audio productions of Neverwhere and Good Omens. His latest collaboration with Gaiman is an adaptation of the groundbreaking Vertigo Comics series The Sandman, produced by Audible and featuring an all-star cast, including James McAvoy as Morpheus.

In a press roundtable attended by CBR, Maggs shared the secrets of The Sandman's production as an audio drama, what first drew him to the source material and how he decided to change his approach to creating the audio drama after learning a television adaptation was in active development at Netflix.

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"I first did it in the early '90s, when I was working at the BBC, and we were doing Superman and Batman stories," recalled Maggs when asked how it's been adapting a visual medium like comics into audio dramas. "And, actually, I learned an awful lot about dramatic construction because I had to adhere to the way comics are written. And it really was a question if you could create in sound what you're seeing on the panels of a comic book.

"And the fact that emerged was, yes, you can actually create Gotham City in sound and, if you're reading a story by Denny O'Neil -- rest in peace -- or whoever it is, and you've got the frames in front of you, you're visualizing it from that point of view. And if you're listening to it in audio, then your own Gotham City takes over because between your ears is the greatest CGI chip ever invented! You've got your imagination in widescreen, if you bypass the optic nerve and sneak in through the side door, the picture is great. Structurally, it was great because there's always a forward momentum when you're reading a comic book. At the end of each page, there's a panel that makes you want to turn over, the speed and pace can all be reflected in sound.

"It was right about '92 that I said to Neil -- whom I had met via mutual friend Phyllis Hume who used to work at DC -- and I said to Neil, 'How about Sandman?' And he said, 'Great!' And then the BBC wouldn't take it because they decided that maybe comics were a little bit lowbrow and not terribly British. Even Sandman, for crying out loud! Neil Gaiman! But Neil wasn't Neil Gaiman then, not so much. So it was a 28-year journey to bring it here. But, as Neil says, both he and I know a bit more now and we have a bit more sort of influence so we can bully our way through things that we want to do a certain way, and we were able to do a better job overall, hopefully."

"Casting something like this isn't really hard because [the actors are] all fans. That's the great part. In fact, Michael Sheen was pretty much on the doorstep asking to be let in, and we weren't going to turn him down either," observed Maggs when asked about assembling the all-star ensemble to voice the comic's iconic characters.

"We already worked with James McAvoy on Neverwhere for the BBC back in 2012; we had an amazing cast, we had Benedict Cumberbatch, we had Christopher Lee, for crying out loud. But the thing about James is, when I'm working in the studio, I'm in with the actors, I'm letting the technicians worry about how it sounds, I'm just working on performance. James is like a little ball of energy, he's totally committed to finding his way into the character. So we had a discussion before about how we thought Morpheus would play but then we were workshopping it up.

"And the thing about Morpheus is he's kind of a passive character in some ways, he's one of the Endless, he's here forever. So he's just there and talks in white or black. There's this kind of stillness about him. What I needed, because I don't have pictures and can't show reaction shots, for example, I need an actor who's already giving energy just by being in the room, and that's James. And, of course, James can do the voices. We discussed should he be a Scottish Morpheus, should he be an English Morpheus, should he be an American Morpheus? And, in the end, we went for a sort of classical British actor kind of feel to it because that's where Neil originally heard it in his head.

"And a lot of this exercise was to get back in Neil's head between 1988 and 1990 -- we're doing the first 20 comics -- and I had his original scripts and I could see what he was trying to ask the artists to do things and turn it into narration, but also turn it into how I directed the actors to play it. And when I was talking to James about Morpheus or Michael about playing Lucifer, we were able to sort of find a way into the characters. We won't get it right for everybody but, in the end, a cast of that caliber are going to give you something which should be in the ballpark."

RELATED: Audible's The Sandman Faithfully Adapts and Enhances the Comic Story

Sandman DC Comics

In response to a question from CBR about how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted production, including McAvoy being forced to record his performance at home due to the self-quarantine lockdown, and potential future installments, Maggs was a bit more unsure. "The truth is I don't know how it will work in the future because who knows where we're going to be. How it worked was really, really well. I was worried about it and I was directing [McAvoy] via Zoom, but instead of [seeing him head-on, I saw him perform into a mic from his profile]; I had a nice view of his elbow, his elbow was acting very well! [Laughs] In the end, it's all really spoken word, I'm not blocking for theater or film or TV, so giving him notes wasn't a problem. It was more technical things like if he was too close to the mic.

"One of the virtues of having him do a play earlier this year, where he shot his voice on stage -- and I'm not surprised because I went to see it and he was yelling all evening -- was that he couldn't do the ensemble. We got into lockdown before he was able to do the recordings, which meant I could send him the early mixes. I had placeholders for Morpheus and he was able to hear them and he knew the angle where he had to attack and get in through the kinks in the armor and that was the clever part. But because it's a world of the imagination, it's like green-screen acting, in a way, where they just have it all in them and bring it out. And that's the thing about James, like I said, he's got this energy and he can do that. So it worked out fine, Sam. That's a long way of saying it worked out fine! [Laughs]"

The Sandman volume: Fables and Reflections comic stories by Neil Gaiman

"My rule for writing and adapting is to write it with cinematic grammar because that way we're used to the grammar of cinema, the long shot, the medium shot, the close-up, all of that. I write it like that and I make sure that all ready, in my mind, how it's going to sound in post-production," explained Maggs when asked how he adapted the story, including its numerous ensemble sequences. "If you've got a pair of earbuds, that's probably the best way to listen to it because it's kind of mixed for that. You'll hear that the actors are actually moving backwards and forwards on a sort of a wide screen in front of you and then the music comes on a bit more and the effects in the background.

"This is a stereo mix, but maybe someday we'll have Dolby Atmos so you can have it all around you. But the idea is you're not in the center of the action because that would drive you crazy, but you're immersed in it and they're playing the scene out in front of you. It's a very careful process of making sure it's clear who is talking at any one time, adding foley that would normally only be added for movies and building up a picture... It's something we're hardwired in the brain, noises turn into pictures. You can infer an environment in a room before you enter it by what you hear. This is what makes the magic work: If I can mix it right, hopefully, you don't need a picture."

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"Neil calls me the guy who goes in the minefield first! I'm not blowing my own trumpet here, this is what he says to keep me sweet. What he really thinks who knows," Maggs chuckled when asked how he was able to adapt Sandman after numerous stalled attempts to bring the Vertigo Comics series to the screen. "The thing about audio is we can do an awful lot for a lot less money and a lot less people than you can do for any [motion] picture project. And we can do it these days with digital technology to the same technical specifications, so although we're doing it without any cameras in the room, there's no wardrobe, no sets, no lighting, what have you, we still have all those production values you'd associate with a movie. As a result, I can get something like this off the ground at a price that someone like Audible is willing to look at and make happen.

"The other thing that I would personally say is that Audible is an insanely great medium and if this does anything at all, it can fly a flag from the nearest high ground to say you can listen and you don't have to have pictures. You can clear your garage and just get lost in the world of The Sandman or lie back in your La-Z-Boy and close your eyes and drink margaritas. It's a very flexible medium not only for the listener but also for us as creatives. The skill is in making it so that listeners are lost in it and aren't suddenly jarred by something that really doesn't explain itself well. Douglas Adams once said audio plays much better than television but it only pays a third of the price so why bother?"

"It's fantastic to look at the scaffolding behind the building facade and that's what the scripts are. What's really great was that Neil is communicating what's in his mind's eye and ear to the artists so that they can create it, and this worked on a number of levels," revealed Maggs when asked what it was like to work directly with the original comic-book scripts. "First of all, in the pictures I found ambiguous -- 'What's happening to John Dee here when he's confronting Morpheus in that final battle?' -- [it explained what was going on]. The other things is, Neil as a writer -- and he's only 26 when he wrote this, and I emailed him one night while I was doing the mixing saying 'Bloody hell, you were good back in the day!' and he laughed and said 'Yeah, I'm not that person anymore, it's like someone else wrote it!' -- but hearing it is reminding me where I was in my head.

"He wrote these long descriptions, and some of them are really beautiful and lyrical and they're not in the book. So it was really great to put them back in [Neil's] mouth because it's like when Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, did a play for voices called Under Milk Wood, which the BBC did back in the 1950s, which was always one of my guiding lights for doing straight drama. And some of Neil's stuff has got that kind of beautiful, lyrical rhythms and poetry. And the one thing that I never had to worry about is Neil doing the reading. One of the first things Neil said to me when this was actually going to happen is if he could be the narrator, and I said, 'Yeah, maybe but I might ask you to audition.' [Laughs] One of my favorite episodes is 'Into the Night' because there's a Dylan Thomas thing when you go into their dreams, it's really quite surreal."

In response to a question from CBR about what personally drew him to the original source material decades ago and what he was particularly keen on adapting, Maggs remembered the comic series' scope and quality fondly. "It was the ambition of it. I thought it was insane. I thought anybody who writes this must be on something serious, and it turns out that all he was on was cups of tea, which just shows how exceptional Neil is. I was doing Batman and Superman, and then Phyllis Hume -- who deserves to be memorialized because none of this would've happened without Phyllis Hume, who is sadly no longer with us and was the international rights editor at DC -- we used to speak on the phone on a Friday, and she said that when I finished [what I was working on], I had to read The Sandman; this was about 1990.

"She sent me Preludes & Nocturnes and it was like, 'Where is this going?!' And it was like this surreal kind of trip, and you realize that [Neil] had really worked this thing out. By the time I had gotten to Seasons of Mist, I was so flipping hooked and I thought this was a no-brainer; if the BBC were taking Batman and Superman, they were surely going to take this by a British writer because he's inventing our mythology here! Would they take it? [Shakes head] But we ended up here, better than we could have done earlier."

Morpheus contest in The Sandman comics.

"My view has changed because I know so much more about what I'm doing now as a director of straight stuff as opposed to comic-book stuff -- though, arguably, when we were doing the comic-book stuff, we made it very straight -- and I have found layers of subtlety in what Neil wrote," noted Maggs when asked how his perspective and work ethic had changed since first being introduced to The Sandman.

"One of the great things about working with actors is that they find stuff in a script that even the author didn't know was there, and that's just magic. This is why they pay big bucks to actors like James and Taron Egerton and Kat Dennings. They're not paying them just for their beauty or voices, they're paying them for brains. These guys come in with an intelligent approach and they mine the lines for stuff and it sounds like the most pretentious bullshit but it really isn't. They can absolutely find stuff I didn't know was there and that Neil didn't know was there, and there were times when James or Taron and Shey Greyson, who is playing Rose, did stuff that we weren't expecting. I would've been too insecure to let that happen 28 years ago. Now, I welcome it, and now I don't go in with preconceptions.

"We finally got this underway and then they announced the TV version -- and that's great and Neil is involved with both, which is the best possible news for anyone who loves The Sandman -- but the first thing I'm thinking is 'Okay, that's going to change what we're doing here.' It's like when the Titanic leaves the South Hampton docks, if there's a sailboat in the way, the backwash just capsizes it. It took me a couple days to think what I was going to do here, and I just went back to the draft of Episode 1 and I rewrote it because I realized, actually, the way to go with this is go back to the way Neil wrote it originally. I'll stick to what everybody loves and they can do what they like in the other version because we are absolutely mother lode Sandman. And it's been the best experience ever because it stopped me from trying to be clever instead of trusting the author, and that's been the best part of it."

Helmed by Dirk Maggs and narrated by Neil Gaiman, Audible's The Sandman stars the voices of James McAvoy, Riz Ahmed, Kat Dennings, Taron Egerton, Samantha Morton, Bebe Neuwirth, Andy Serkis and Michael Sheen. The audio drama is available now through Audible.

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