Netflix’s In Your Dreams may look like that burst of color and imagination coming alive in the world of a child’s dreams, but underneath the sugar-coated chaos and sweet soundtrack is a story about an older sister and younger brother refusing to let their parents separate and relying on the myth of the Sandman to pull a drifting family back together.
The cast and crew of the upcoming feature talked about what it means to build a movie rooted in dream logic while still keeping both feet planted in real emotion.
The Nerds of Color had a chance to join a virtual press conference to talk to director Alex Woo, as well as the cast Craig Robinson, Simu Liu, Cristin Milioti, Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Elias Janssen, and Gia Carides about the film, how it connects to audiences, and more.
For Woo, the foundation of In Your Dreams is personal rather than conceptual. “I woke up one morning and found my mom at the front door with her bags packed,” he said. “This movie is very much about me reconciling the fact that life is not perfect, there’s a lot of messiness in life, but there’s also a beauty in that.” That experience became the film’s north star, steering the spectacle toward something kids and parents can recognize when home suddenly feels different.
Stevie (Hoang-Rappaport) and Elliot (Janssen) journey into the dream realm to find the Sandman after Elliot steals a book about him, convinced the legend can grant a wish to save their parents’ (Liu and Milioti) marriage.
The film starts off with a seemingly happy tone, especially with the use of Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” but reveals itself to be something deeper and more layered than something about two kids exploring the world of dreams. And a lot of that comes through with Stevie pinning her hopes on successfully keeping the family together by finding the Sandman. But things get complicated when she learns that her younger brother and his stuffed giraffe, Tony Baloney (Robinson) are also along for this quest.
What keeps the film floating on that dreamlike cloud is how it sets up a familiar hero-versus-villain frame and then refuses to pick sides. The twist is not a gotcha moment but rather it is a truer picture of family. Liu believes that honesty anchors In Your Dreams in reality. “I mean, I think in our early conversations, it was really important to show that, you know, no one is at fault,” Liu said. “Therefore, there’s no bad guy or good guy in whatever is happening between mom and dad.”
If the dreamscapes feel oddly specific instead of random, that is by design. The team sourced them from lived experience. “When we started the movie, we gave everybody on our crew a dream journal,” Woo said. “A lot of the dreams in the film were actually based on dreams our crew had.”
Watching those script pages turn into sequences was a jolt for the young leads. Hoang-Rappaport recalled how one of her favorite dreams came to life. “Seeing it come to life, larger than life, with the anime girl power-up sequence, I wasn’t expecting that.”
For Janssen, he loved how kid logic turns into motion in wild ways. “Elliot’s bed comes to life and they’re flying through the sky,” he said. “It shows how creative these dreams can be.”
Hoang-Rappaport lit up when talking about her favorite sequence to record. “My favorite one was the fight with Frank, the giant teddy bear,” she said. “We’re flying around on this bed trying to take him down. When I first read it, it was hard to visualize what it was going to look like, but when I went back to re-record, they played the animatic, and I saw just how larger than life it was. The timing, the scale, I was just dying in the studio.”
The moment only got bigger as the animation came together. “Seeing it fully animated, with the anime girl power-up sequence I wasn’t expecting, was so much fun,” she said. “I even have videos of me voicing it, and Alex doing it with me. He probably wouldn’t want me to share those, but it was a lot of fun.”
Since In Your Dreams centers on Stevie and Elliot’s sister-brother dynamic, it only makes sense that the film also treats their bond as the engine that keeps the story moving. Janssen underlines why Elliot is so important to their quest. “He really looks up to Stevie, and he just wants to spend time with her and hang out with her,” he said. “I also have two older siblings, so I know what that’s like.”
Hoang-Rappaport mirrors that energy on the other side of the relationship as the sister who believes it is her responsibility to keep the family together. “She’s a fixer who thinks a perfect wish can fix a family,” she said. “As she goes on this journey, she realizes maybe not everything can go exactly to plan, and maybe that is okay when you have family to support you.”
While the sequence captures the sweetness of the movie, it also showcases the absurd comedy and aching sincerity within the same frame. Which is why Baloney Tony (Robinson), a one-eyed stuffed giraffe, plays such a pivotal role for our sibling duo. And now just comedically. He starts as a gag and ends up being a massive help to the two kids. “We wanted him to look like one of those cheap plushies,” Woo said.
“I didn’t go in thinking, ‘I gotta bring that heart,’” Robinson described the collaborative process. “We just kind of rolled it out there,” he said.
Music helps guide the emotional rhythm of the film, grounding the dream world in something familiar and warm. Woo grew up on the classics, and he brings that formative soundtrack with him, along with a few nods to his favorite pieces of childhood cinema. “I grew up in the ’80s,” he said, “E.T., Labyrinth, Goonies, Back to the Future.” the homages are baked right in, including a direct musical lift.
“Back to the Future is one of my all-time favorite movies,” he said, “The song ‘Mr. Sandman’ is from that film, and I had to put it in this movie.”
As for the other musical influences, the characters carry musical echoes. “Mom and Dad had a band called the Hypsonics,” he said. Eventually, the two had Stevie and Elliot, which forced them to put their musical dreams on hold. At least for mom, who made a shift to get a job teaching music to kids and now has an opportunity to teach as an associate professor in Dulith. However, an appresheive Dad believes that mom has given up on the dream of releasing an album
The needle drops don’t just stop at Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” or The Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman” — some are delightfully on the nose. “Stevie Nicks has that very famous song ‘Dreams,’” he said. “It just felt so appropriate.”
The way they built those feelings was discovery first, precision later. Early records were loose and actor-driven, with room to try things. “In the beginning, it feels really like a blank slate, kind of blue sky situation,” Liu said. “You absolutely cannot improv because millions of dollars have gone into animating these characters.”
Hoang-Rappaport then chimed in about the challenges of doing ADR. “They’ll piece it together in front of you, and you’re watching to see if you failed in real time.”
Even the film’s fear has compassion. Nightmara stalks like a nightmare but speaks like someone who has been here before. However, there seems to be a layered complexity to a character that is perceived to be someone as villainous. “She had to be scary,” Carides said. “But I wove in some loving, earthy, grounded wisdom,” she said.
In the film, the Sandman vilifies Nightmara as the presence that jolts a dreamer awake with something frightening, so most kids grow up treating nightmares like alarms to avoid rather than messages to decode. As such, Carides imagined a long history with the Sandman that gives the characters and their dynamic some nuance. “Maybe they dated. Maybe divorced,” she said. “Like, he’s my ex-husband,” she said.
And when all the color and chaos settle, the film is a labor of love for Woo, who has been working on it for the better part of nine years. It was such a lengthy process that the story kept shifting even late in the game. “The ending changed four or five times,” Liu said.
But what stayed the same was that the answer is that there’s more to dreams than just going to sleep. “It’s not bibbidi-bobbidi-boom, problem solved,” Hoang-Rappaport said. “It’s look around you and hold on to each other,” she said.
In Your Dreams begins streaming exclusively on Netflix on November 14, 2025.
