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Akiva Goldsman on I Am Legend
By Ryan Parsons | Images property of Warner Bros Pictures.
I Am Legend
Akiva's I Am Legend
"As a producer, I hired the writer, me, about two years ago," said Goldsman. "Two and a half years ago? Warner Brothers had yet again decided that the movie was in the broken toy pile, which Warners has a tendency to do with this screenplay. It had had about a zillion incarnations. So, as is their wont, they sort of said, 'Anybody want it?' And I raised my hand. And that was probably marked 719th draft or some such number."
Like most film adaptations, even Goldsman's faithful version had to change some things from the book. "If you look at the source credit, you'll see that it really is adapted both from Matheson's novel, and from Omega Man, which is really an intact work of its own. I's a little bit of a hybrid. I don't want to sort of say specifically what we did and didn't change. We tried to stay true to the spirit. Obviously one of the most contentious issues always in the development of this property has been the ending. So I leave it to others to determine to what degree they find it faithful."
Also, it takes place in New York, which lent itself to some inside jokes located in the background. Spot the billboards for movies that might exist a few years from now.
"One of the big changes from the source material, obviously, is the relocation to New York, which was something that we did because novelistically, it's really very effective to render Los Angeles empty, but cinematically, Los Angeles is always empty, so it's very difficult to kind of really do that sort of stark, ohh, where did everybody go? Very different in New York. So once we got to New York, we just picked a specific date and we built a sort of present, and I took every DC poster and character that I could think of that Warners hadn't made, slapped them up there. Some of them we got cleared and some of them we were just, we stalled, so that clearance never saw them, so I'm pretty sure that somebody owes somebody a lot of money for that Batman versus Superman poster. This is like nerds on parade. We were like, 'Look! And then it'll look like that.'"
Fans may enjoy it now, but New Yorkers weren't too happy to have their streets blocked off for some Hollywood movie. "We had almost every problem you would imagine you would have in New York when you try to shut the streets down. I am a New Yorker. By the end of the shoot, which was endless, none of us would tell anybody what we did for a living, because you'd be at a cocktail party and you would hear across the room, 'Oh, you're that motherf*cker.' There was not someone that we hadn't stopped from getting somewhere by the end. New York actually, they were great. I don't think they saw us coming, but once they sort of took us in, they were really amazing."
I Am Legend opens to theatres on December 14th.
For the trailers, posters and more movie info, go to the I Am Legend
Movie Page.
Ryan Parsons
Sources: Images property of Warner Bros Pictures.
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