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Q+A: AKIVA GOLDSMAN
A web-exclusive chat with the writer and producer of I Am Legend, out now on DVD… We couldn't find room for it in DR#13 (an unusually packed issue, it turns out), so have it now, here…
2007's I Am Legend proved good box office. In the States, it set a new record for opening weekend takings in the month of December, and turned out to be a personal best for Will Smith, who can apparently do no wrong. Death Ray spoke to the film's writer and producer Akiva Goldsman about how it was done, how Hollywood works and the kinds of stories he says he'll never write. He's a stand-up-and-notice player in the Hollywood game – responsible for the widely maligned Batman & Robin, but also taking home the plaudits for A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man. His fantasy credits include Batman Forever, Lost in Space, Practical Magic and I, Robot.
Death Ray: A new adaptation of Matheson's I Am Legend had been doing the rounds at Warner Brothers for some time – when did you step in?
Akiva Goldsman: This particular iteration of the movie has been around for maybe 10 or 15 years. It's coalesced and then fallen apart several times. I came to it about three years ago. The previous recent script, written for Arnold Schwarzenegger, had just fallen apart and they were gonna put it on the shelf, but I asked if I could take a run at it. The director, Francis Lawrence, and I had just worked together on Constantine, and Will and I had worked together on I, Robot, so it was a natural merging.
DR: What did you actually do to the script?
AG: Over the last 10 years, a bunch of ideas had found their way to other movies. 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later were really close cousins to the I Am Legend script as I found it [this was the script written by Mark Protosevich]. For me, there were two pieces of source material – Matheson's novella, and the Corringtons' screenplay for The Omega Man. Our version is a hybrid. What was most interesting to me was the idea of a story that was less about 'Neville versus the monsters' and more about 'Neville versus Neville'. I tried to smuggle a character story into a larger genre movie.
DR: Did you consult with Matheson?
AG: After I had written the script, I called him and said, "Hi! I'm the asshole who's yet again adapted your novel!" I sent it to him, with some production design stuff. And we talked to him during production, though he couldn't come. When he found his way to a screening, we were like, "Oh, shit." And Francis called him, filled with fear, but it turned out he loved it. We were thrilled.
DR: Why shift the story to New York, New York?
AG: From a literary perspective, Los Angeles is a good spot for the end of the world. It's desolate, it's the city of lost souls. So Richard set it in California and correctly so. But having said that, filmically, LA couldn't be less iconic, and it's abandoned on a good day! At four o'clock in the afternoon on Sunset Boulevard it looks like the end of the fucking world! And I'm a New Yorker – this is a city that's never still . If you empty it out, it's gonna have an effect… It created a 'storytelling engine' beneath all the scenes. New York informs everything, in a way that you wouldn't easily get with somewhere else.
DR: Why do you think desolated urban environments are so attractive? We see it so much these days.
AG: I think we have a real awareness of human presnce. And I think isolation is something we all think about – we fantasise about it, we have nightmares about it. This is what Richard tapped into when he wrote the novella. Francis does something very smart with it. Although there are occasional shots that feature isolation, that sell it, the truth is: it's just background, silence. It's the emptiness that slowly starts to inform your point of view
DR: I Am Legend was sold as a blockbuster, and it behaved as such on the market, even breaking records. Yet you were trying to smuggle in a 'character' movie. How did that work?
AG: We were constantly working with: What bends it? What breaks it? How far is too far? How much can we get away with? How quiet can we be? There's very little exposition in the movie and it's all delayed, which is not typical. We were trying to do an indie-style story, within the construction of a larger, more conventional movie.
DR: Is this happening on a wider scale? Is Hollywood "buying in"?
AG: What's happening is that movies like Ali and A Beautiful Mind are ceasing to exist. The mid-range drama is vanishing, so what's happening is these stylistic ideas are being pushed up and down, so that you're having larger movies and smaller movies and no room for mid-range experimentation. Now we're all bringing our better selves to whatever we do.
DR: I've always thought of the novella as about sex. Is your removal of this a compromise, or a readjustment?
AG: A more fundamental change is that we pretty much removed the infected as a force of antagonism. This movie actually has no bad guy. The adversary is Neville. Those changes were a function of economies of scale. The movie, as I said, starts off as I Am Legend and then becomes The Omega Man. It's so hilarious that what we'vedone to it is being considered the light ending!
DR: Charlton Heston and Will Smith both appear messianic, or at least prophetic. But Neville, in the book, becomes the anti-messiah. That's a big change.
AG: The novella is the most nihilistic thing... Fundamentally, what we wanted to do was tell a darkly hopeful story. This is the difference between The Omega Man and our Legend. Matheson's take is literally: the world is devoid of hope for humanity, and that's it. It's interesting – I love it – but it's not the story we wanted to tell.
DR: Does the public demand stories of redemption?
AG: It's because we as storytellers weren't interested in telling a story that hopeless. You have to make a choice about the kind of things you want to put in the world. When Richard Matheson wrote I Am Legend, it was a very different time. It was a simpler time. It was 1950s; it was Cold War. It was good and evil. I think that the world is pretty dark right now in a deeper way, and I would be less than thrilled to put something out there that said there was no hope for mankind.
DR: That, of course, is exactly what 28 Weeks Later did. How did you react to Fresnadillo's take on the zombie genre?
AG: I thought those films were great, but they're not stories I tell. There's no right or wrong story, there are only different stories and Will, Francis and I are people that actually believe that terrible, terrible, terrible darkness is available and present in life, but that hope abides.
DR: Do you have a duty to promote that belief?
AG: It's not even a duty. You can only tell the stories that you find congenial. Storytelling isn't up to you entirely, you just tell the stories you know how to tell. As a storyteller, I am not attracted to stories that have no hope. It doesn't mean that I don't like watching them. I'm just never gonna be the guy that makes them.
DR: That attitude clearly works; I Am Legend was an astonishing success. Did you expect that?
AG: We were very surprised and very pleased. You never quite expect anything like that.
DR: Have you started to process this, rationally? Why have the American public taken to the film?
AG: I haven't. There are a bunch of factors. Everybody loves Will, and finds him to be very compelling and for good reason. There's a kind of transparency to him that engenders intimacy. People like to go on a journey with him and I think there's real intimacy with him in this film. It's a really evocative, imaginative idea. Everybody's had a nightmare about it. Everybody's had a fantasy about it. Everybody's seen a Twilight Zone episode about it. And the movie's a little odd in a way that people like. It leans back more than leans into you.
DR: That's partly because of the silence. How did you cope with that as a screen writer?
AG: It was really fun. Very challenging and very strange. You're writing behaviour – you're not writing words. But you still have to express narrative intent, you have to move the story forwards. It's a really good exercise. If scenes are really working, you should have a silent version of them in your mind anyway, because behaviour and dialogue should be about different things. I think we've fallen into a trap in Hollywood which is that people are doing and saying the same things. And I think that's wildly annoying.
Administrator April 25, 2008, 01:19:45
