Joseph Gordon-Levitt: You won't see any punching in the 'Sandman' movie

The Sandman comics are some of the most surreal, disturbing graphic novels of our time. So it's tough to imagine the Neil Gaiman-penned adventures of the personification of Dream made into a Hollywood blockbuster.

But that's precisely what Joseph Gordon-Levitt is trying to do. He gave an update on his Sandman movie, which he is producing in collaboration with David Goyer, to MTV Sunday. He was appropriately vague about the process of trying to condense the seven-year series into a two-hour movie, saying that the going is "slow but steady." One thing he could promise us about Sandman was that it wouldn't be your typical superhero movie:
“Big spectacular action movies are generally about crime fighters fighting crime and blowing (expletive) up. This has nothing to do with that. 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 true, the Sandman graphic novels read more like an extended Gothic nightmare than your average comic book. In a good way.

The comics technically do take place in the DC Comics universe, with typical superhero characters like John Constantine or Element Girl popping up every now and then, but quickly go into surreal territory, with the Sandman (also known as Morpheus or Dream) taking trips to Hell or having dysfunctional family meetings with his similarly powerful siblings like Death, Desire, Delirium or Destiny. (We're most excited to see if Death, who's portrayed as a post-punk Goth girl with awesome hair, pops up in this movie.)

Gordon-Levitt acknowledged the weirdness of the comics, telling MTV's Josh Horowitz that it's a "complicated adaptation" with no real beginning, middle or end in the original 1989-1996 run. And the story's still going, with Gaiman recently publishing a prequel to his Sandman series, Sandman: Overture.

But, despite the difficulties of source materia, Gordon-Levitt is confident in his big screen adaptation.
“It’s going to be like a grand spectacular action film, but that relies on none of those same old ordinary cliches."