CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 12/14/07

Revisiting the Legend:
I Am Legend's Mark Protosevich

By peter clines

Mark Protosevich talks about working on the latest adaptation of I Am Legend for almost 12 years and loving the story for almost his whole life.

In 1954, novelist Richard Matheson penned his unique vampire tale, I Am Legend. A decade later, he adapted it into the screenplay for The Last Man on Earth, and it was only a few years later that the story became best known as the Charlton Heston cult classic The Omega Man. It's no surprise that Hollywood decided to remake it again in the mid-'90s, but, despite having names like Ridley Scott, Michael Bay, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger attached, the project began a slow slide into development hell. Now starring Will Smith, the story returns to the screen more than 50 years after its inception.

Smith plays Robert Neville, a man living an all but hopeless existence on the island of Manhattan, the only survivor of a nightmare plague that wiped mankind off the map. He spends every day scavenging the city for food, medicine, and any other supplies he can find. He spends every night locked inside his fortress-like brownstone, waiting and watching. For while no human survived the plague…not all of them died from it. A new species of predator hunts New York's nights—strong, vicious, and every one of them thirsting for Neville's blood.

Screenwriter Mark Protosevich [who shares credit with producer Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind)] took some time off to talk about Matheson's influence on a young writer, Neville's ongoing internal struggles, and how it's impossible to please people with an adaptation.

You've been on this project for years, right?
I wrote my first draft in 1996. I turned in my first draft of I Am Legend before The Cell was made, but The Cell was the first script that I sold. It was my calling card that got me the meeting at Warner Brothers that led to I Am Legend. Lorenzo di Bonaventura really liked The Cell and wanted to meet with me about possible writing assignments. So, I went into his office and he said, "I really loved your script, and there are three projects that I think you would be great for. The first one is I Am Legend. Do you know it?" Literally, my heart stopped for a moment. When you're a kid and dreaming about a career in the movie business, or even fantasizing about what kind of things you'll write, I never would've dreamed of the possibility of that. And there it was, right out on the table. So, I said, "We don't even need to talk about the other two. What do I have to do to get this job?"

This film's been done twice before and it's been in production hell for over a decade. Why did people keep pushing to do it?
I think what's appealing about the story is this idea of being the last man on earth. Perhaps the closest thing you could compare it to would be being alone on a desert island. It is, at its core, a survival story, but the canvas is so large. You really do think, as Neville thinks for a large portion of the story, that he may be the very, very last one. It's one of those nightmare scenarios that some curious part of our soul wants to investigate. You want to ask yourself, would I be able to do it? Would I survive? Would I muster the courage and be able to maintain a sense of hope in the face of utter despair? Or would I completely deteriorate into a sniveling mess and hide in the closet or kill myself? What I like about the book, and what was very important to me to put in the movie, was the idea that Neville struggles with those issues himself. You get into these great philosophical and psychological questions about what we need as human beings to survive and maintain our sanity and a sense of hope.

Would you say this is a new adaptation of the story I Am Legend or a remake of The Omega Man?
Well, in a way, I would say it's both. You have to bear in mind there wouldn't be an Omega Man without I Am Legend. I do think there were certain elements of the book that were absolutely essential to maintain. One of the things I love about the book is that you get into Neville's head. You are with him every step of the way, understanding his ups and downs and his moments of joy and his moments of despair. The Last Man on Earth is the most faithful. It's a very small-scale, internal movie about ideas. His interaction with people and the creatures is relatively small-scale, and the threat of the creatures is even more psychological than physical.

The problem is, you're dealing with a movie audience that has really changed from 1954 when the book was written. I had to bear in mind that there had been dozens of vampire and zombie movies since then. This is a world where people have seen Terminator and Alien—those aren't the same movies as the 1950s horror/sci-fi stories. I wanted to make a movie that would hopefully hold its own against the big players in that genre while maintaining its own integrity.

Were there any set pieces that the studio really wanted to see in this?
No, there was nothing like that at all. I was never dictated any type of things. In fact, I would have to say that when I wrote that first draft, and really any of the drafts, they were very much purer experiences. I think that's one of the reasons the script was met with such positive response, that it didn't feel calculated. It didn't feel contrived.

The only thing that I would say was a major point of discussion from the very beginning was that it not be a "vampire" movie. If you're a fan of the original book, you know that a large part of it is this scientific approach to the vampire myth. It's an investigative piece about Neville's research into why these creatures are behaving like vampires, and finding a scientific reason for the stakes, the garlic, all of that. But the idea of the traditional vampire mythology…we felt at the beginning that if you deal with that, then it's just a vampire movie, as opposed to something that works in a larger sense. Once that word is thrown out there, it's got baggage, and some people might not want to go see it because of that word. The story itself, and the themes and character aspects of that story, are more than what that word brings up in people's imaginations.

Looking at all the versions of this story, the monsters keep devolving, so to speak. In Matheson's novel and in Last Man on Earth, they're articulate creatures. In Omega Man, they're ghoulish luddites. Here, they're almost bestial. Why the change?
Well, there was an evolution in that, as well. In my very first draft, they did speak and they had devolved into a more primitive esthetic. They were very much about the body and the abilities of their new bodies, transformed by the infection, but they did speak and communicate. It was decided very soon after that draft that it might work better if they were even more devolved. I think a large part of it was that the dialogue becomes tough. You wonder about how it might come across. When I went back to work on the script in 2003 with Will Smith, I spoke with a neurosurgeon in Boston about the possibility of a disease affecting certain areas of the brain. It's very possible for some type of virus to affect memory, to affect language, to make you lose sense of right and wrong. To essentially bring you back to the savage. What was always a part of the story is hinting that there are traces of humanity still there. You can never forget that these aren't aliens and they're not the resurrected dead. These are people affected by a virus.

You mentioned working with Will Smith. Was there anything he specifically wanted to make this into a "Will Smith project"?
It's funny, I actually try not to read message boards and postings. I wish I could say I'm incredibly thick-skinned, but I am not, and I find most of the stuff so negative. But I was really shocked to see, when it was announced Will was going to do it, some of the stuff people said. The idea that he has a certain style or a certain character that he plays in movies. But the Will Smith in Men In Black is very different than the Will Smith in Pursuit of Happyness or Ali. What was most important for him was understanding this guy's character. He certainly wasn't talking about, "Well, I need more scenes where I'm doing heroic stuff." Not in the slightest. It was all about who is this guy, what's his background, what keeps him going. I would say that he had an incredibly good understanding of the psychological complexity of this character and the terrifying aspects of the story itself. He was very encouraging of taking the script into darker places.

You've got a character who's alone on screen for a huge amount of the story. Did you worry about how dense this made most of the script?
I never felt that would be a problem. I had faith that you could go through long patches of the movie where he was the only person you were seeing and not a whole lot was being said. You're talking about the basic component of what a motion picture is, and that's the ability to capture movement. It's not so much the ability to capture dialogue or sound—that's secondary. You can learn so much through simple action and movement. I love movies like that, where so much of it is carried by the visual aspect of storytelling and character development, because there's something beautifully pure about it. I think the stuff in I Am Legend, those sequences are incredibly compelling, and I credit Francis and Will for that. In terms of the visualization of one person on screen, I think they both did a tremendous job.

In a general sense, do you think there's a point when something's changed so much you can't really call it an adaptation anymore?
I get your point. From what I've heard, Richard Matheson has given the movie his stamp of approval. I certainly feel there's justification for calling it by that title. It's not like it's veered so far from the source material. I don't think so.

Here's an interesting example, and I'm not sure how most people come out on this. Look at The Shining. There are some great liberties taken towards the end that are quite different from the book. I like the movie. I like the book. I even liked the TV miniseries they did that was incredibly faithful to the book. I remember seeing Blade Runner for the first time and being so blown away. I had not read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? before that movie came out, so I ran right out and got it—and was stunned at how different the book was from the movie. A lot of liberties were taken.

There are all sorts of approaches to adaptations. There is this innate desire to put some of yourself in there as well. I don't think that's arrogance, I just think that's inevitability as a creative person. I think there has to be some consideration taken into expanding this story or approaching it in a way that it could be something bigger than what a faithful adaptation of the book would be. Everybody who adapts has to go through these decisions.

No matter what, if there's one thing I know, there are certain people in the world who—if you don't do a page-for-page translation of the original book—they're going to be disappointed. That's just the way it is. And I always feel like those people should just keep reading the book, because that will give them what they want. Do you need the movie to give you exactly the experience you had when you were reading the book? When I was presented with doing this, I almost had an immediate vision of what the movie could be. I felt like I was honoring the source material, but it was clearly going to be different. That's what I was inspired to do. I'm sure some people who want that incredibly faithful adaptation will be angry, but I think other people who are just going in for the movie experience will be thrilled by it and engaged by it.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

I Am Legend courtesy Warner Bros.

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