Speaking to Seth Grahame-Smith about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter provided a pretty vivid picture of the book-to-screen adaptation process, not to mention the sometimes difficult working relationship between a director and a writer. And particularly when the two of them are, at heart, interested in very different things.
Here?s some of what Graheme-Smith had to tell me when I was able to get him on the phone earlier in the week. I think this makes for a most interesting read, particularly if you are a screenwriter, or interested the practicalities of screenwriting.
This was a learning experience for me because win you write a book, you are the last say in what the story is. When you write a movie, the director is the king, and not only that, the studio has to weigh in. It?s sort of story by committee in a way.
We did so many drafts over so many months, and which each successive draft I felt it getting further and further away from the book and crystallising into what Timur wanted to make ? an aggressive, muscular, action movie version of this premise.
The book is much more steeped in the minutiae of history and the real facts of Lincoln?s life than the movie is. The movie takes the premise of Abraham Lincoln hunting vampires and explodes it into this wonderfully insane action piece.
I think I speak for everybody on the production when I say, of course, the premise is ridiculous. I?ve always acknowledged that the premise is in fact ridiculous. But I also think that the joke has to end at the title. It would be one thing if we took this premise and gave it the Mel Brooks treatment but, to me, what?s fun about it is that you have a ridiculous premise and you commit to it fully.
What I would tell people is, ?Look, you?re going to get an insane action movie from the director of Wanted, so in some sense you already know what that means. If you go back and look at Wanted, that movie doesn?t exactly make sense on every level, it?s a bit over the top and ridiculous? ? as, in fact, is this movie. But we do actually take real historical events, and a beloved historical figure and re-examine his life in an absurd way.
When people hear the premise one of two things tends to happen. Either they say ?Oh my god, I can?t wait to see that? and ?it sounds so weird and unique?, or the other way that it goes is ?What the hell are you talking about?? and a sort of disbelief that such a thing even exists. I think that?s good, actually. In a world where 90% of movies are sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, based on board games, video games or toys, it?s good to have something that is a little bit audacious and original, at least in terms of summer movies.
Now having seen the film with some audiences I think that for the first third, some people are still trying to get their footing wondering ?What am I supposed to think here? When is the guy in the clown nose going to come out and say Ha Ha Just Kidding?? That?s the tricky part of it. It was much easier in the book. In the book I could set up how this all came to be, and how this supposed journal came into my possession.
A book is a 20 hour investment, into 300 or 400 pages, but a film is an hour and a half to get in, get out, thrill people from beginning to end. When it became clear that we were doing a 3D crazy action movie, then those bits of the story that we didn?t need to serve that fell off.
It was a difficult adaptation for me. I rather like the book and I had a lot of my author?s ego wrapped up in it and I definitely fought.
But the book didn?t have a central villain, it didn?t have a character like Adam. It tends to be helpful to have a villain in a big action movie. And it didn?t have a thrilling climax like the train sequence that you saw, or like the horse sequence that you saw. Those things weren?t in the book.
And neither was the character of Will, played by Anthony Mackie. I think he?s one place where the movie succeeds more than the book. We?re dealing with the plight of the African American people and, in the book, there?s no one to give voice to that. The film actually does that much better.
The big action sequences were kind of out of my hands. The movie that Timur wants to make is in his head and he?s the only one who knows what it looks like in full. My job as a writer was to try and keep up with him. He would drive me crazy. As a writer I like to outline things, I like to have a plan, I like to make sure everything connects together but Timur is the kind of director who will suddenly be inspired by an image that pops into his head and all of a sudden it becomes a game of trying to make everything fit to suit the image.
You never get to a place with Timur where you can say ?Okay, we?ve got the script, let?s go film it.? What?s interesting is that the draft that a lot of people read of the script, when it was a Black List script and people were talking about it, that was the script that got the movie the green light. And then, once we got the green light, everything changed again. We kept on going and going and going.
I left the movie at one point to go and work on Dark Shadows and another writer, Simon Kinberg, did most of the work during production. When I came back, there were huge swathes of the movie I just didn?t recognise. Things had kept changing and changing.
And getting more and more mixed up, by the looks of things.
Now, Grahame-Smith is right, the film does seem like a Timur Bekmembetov movie first and foremost, often becoming the same kind of dizzy, giddy action movie circus as Wanted. But there are a lot of other ideas in the film too, most of them rooted, to a large extent, in the original book. It?s a strange cocktail, but that?s ?a good part of why I liked it.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is in UK and US cinemas as of now. More from Grahame-Smith later.
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