Every once in a while, I get an email from someone complaining why jumbo jets and cars exist today in the 21st century, instead of sailing ships and horse-drawn carriages like in the 21st century of the book. And also things like "There aren't any nuclear bombs in the book!" or "Why aren't they shooting muskets instead of machineguns!" or "Lionel Verney doesn't work at a hospital in the book!". This is a movie adaptation, so it's not going to "look" as the book describes.

I usually dismiss those emails, assuming that they might answer their own questions after a little deeper thought into why Mary Shelley's 21st century doesn't "look" anything like the 21st century we actually live in today.

Just yesterday, someone posted a comment on the blog, asking if we had bothered reading the book because the trailer didn't look like what she envisioned reading the book, I suppose.

I found it in the spam filter (without a valid email address, they automatically go into the spam filter folder) so I thought this blog entry might help spell out what may not be apparent to people who didn't work on the film or have access to the script.

I was saving this for the electronic press kit but if you really want to know, all the answers are right here:

ON THE ADAPTATION:
I had to do some major surgery in my adaptation of the Mary Shelley story. First, Mary Shelley’s 21^st century reads exactly like the 1820’s, nothing at all like the 21^st century we live in today, so all of that dated stuff had to go, unless we wanted to make a 36 hour “alternate universe” sci-fi mini-series. When you don’t have a budget to begin with, expensive period pieces are ridiculous to even consider. So yes, there are computers in the 21st century, along with cars, buses, planes and assault weapons.

I had to film this picture in Arizona, not in Europe or the Middle East. I’m in the desert southwest, there’s not a lot here but cactus and coyotes in the eyes of most visitors. I had to make this whole thing work in the small metropolis of Tucson and the surrounding desert with a budget that was about the same as “El Mariachi” by Robert Rodriguez. No easy trick, let me tell you. That hard reality affected every choice in the production but that never limited the imagination that went into it.

ON THE STRUCTURE:
The book is made up of three volumes. It’s a very expansive story that unfolds in three phases. After establishing many of the characters and their backstories in volume one, volume two gets into the crusade against the Mohammedans. In volume three, the plague gets into full swing. That’s fine structurally, if you ever decide to make a very, very slow paced, 36 hour mini-series and happen to have a spare hundred million dollars to make something that no one will want to watch.

One year, Steven Spielberg made an adaptation of H.G. Wells “War Of The Worlds”, a very modernized adaptation. The biggest complaint about that movie wasn’t the modernization. Surprisingly, the biggest complaint was the ending happened with the same suddenness as the book. Even purists complained. That same year, a British film adaptation of the same story came out, which was a beautiful period piece that was very faithful to the source material. It bombed. Even the purists complained that it was boring. That taught me two very important lessons: (1) It’s a movie, not a book on film, and; (2) purists will still buy the Spielberg version but not the faithfully adapted version. Okay then.

Can a work of literature be improved upon when it goes to the screen? Not as a book, no. But as a movie, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of “The Shining” outshined the novel by far as a story. Indignant purists got their wish with the mini-series, which was a great deal more faithful to the book but it never captured anyone’s imagination like Kubrick‘s iconic version. Okay, lessons learned.

To make this work as a two-hour feature, I decided to fold the three volumes into one then distill it down into something a lot more dynamic. The core story of “The Last Man” is amazing as an early example of science-fiction. Is it possible to love the story but absolutely hate the writing? Of course it’s blasphemy to admit but honestly, it wasn’t very enjoyable to read, it felt like a painful chore. But reflecting on the core story, mentally editing out everything that slowed the story down to an agonizing crawl, was a very beautiful story that desperately needed to be tightened up, if it was ever going to appeal to anyone in movie form.

Another significant change I had to make was the "Roman à clef" style expository. It had to go because it competed too strongly with the core story and ultimately overwhelmed it. Then I took the war against the Mohammedans defending Constantinople to a modern city (one I can film in) and put the main character within that city too, leaving them to fight their crusade in the middle of the plague. Then I placed the two most compelling characters of the story into conflict with each other and cut out the melodrama. That structure shaved off about 34 hours of non-eventful story telling by condensing it down to the momentum of the core story. That was major structural surgery but this book really doesn't lend itself easily for a motion picture. It took a lot of work to pare it down to a two-hour movie that developed the core story as its dramatic center. In these ways, the movie differs from the book because movies are a different and much more stringent entertainment medium than literature.

ON THE METAPHORS:
Things have changed little since the book was written in regard to how society treats those with potentially fatal, communicable illnesses. Whether it’s the Bubonic plague, Typhoid, HIV, or simply the “infected” in a movie, it’s all about dehumanizing the ill to a status on the same level as the “undead”, because it’s okay, it's even applauded to “kill” movie zombies in the most gruesome ways possible.

That was not Mary Shelley’s message in “The Last Man”. That’s one of the things that sets this story apart from “The Omega Man” and “I Am Legend” or your typical zombie movie. Not that I don’t enjoy a good zombie movie like everyone else, but that sentiment would betray the metaphors embodied by this book. In Mary Shelley’s book, the plague is merely a catalyst, humanity self-destructs, the characters making one ignorant, bigoted, and dehumanizing decision after another, which seems all the more plausible today, because that’s the nature of human conceit. That’s the focus of this adaptation.

ON THE THEMES:
Within this story, Mary Shelley illustrates a lot of important themes that are still valid today. Sure, there were several other themes that are no longer valid, like women’s suffrage that is no longer at issue in the 21^st century. I dropped those obsolete themes and kept the ones still at issue today, especially the destructiveness of bigotry and ultimately genocide. Most of us have heard it said that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter, but the theme few have ever noticed in Shelley's book goes a little deeper, as one man’s crusade is another man’s genocide. It’s a remarkable subtext that few have gleaned when analyzing this book. That message is a major reason why I decided to make this film.

ON THE LITERARY CRITICISMS:
Okay, it’s no secret that the book has a lot of problems. It begs to be edited. Many scholars and critics have suggested that those literary problems were responsible for making the book fall into obscurity ever since it was first published following “Frankenstein“. I read all of those literary criticisms written over the past hundred years carefully and didn’t want to make those same mistakes. I’d rather make my own. It’s my adaptation (for the movie I had to go through the fire to make), so I was going to make all of the changes I thought would make the core story work best under cinematic conventions.

I had a few others read all three volumes of the book too. The reaction I got was consistent - they all thought I was crazy to try to make a film out of it, complaining how slow and redundant the narrative was to read because of the dated writing style and the never-ending lamentations. My producer read it first and asked me, “Once you edit out all of the over-indulgent prose, is there enough of a story left to make a movie out of this?”

ON THE MAIN CHARACTER:
That was the most difficult problem to address because the main character, Lionel Verney was pretty-much a passive observer. That might work fine in literature but in film, the camera is the passive observer and I already had a camera. Without a compelling main character who had some necessity to be in the story, we didn’t have a movie. At least, not a very interesting movie. That’s where literature and motion pictures often part company when it comes to adapting a book for another medium like film.

ON THE INFLUENCE OF RAYMOND'S CHARACTER:
The most compelling character in the book is Lord Raymond. Lionel Verney admired him a great deal, even as far as wishing to be more like him. In the book, the militaristic Raymond is actually the one responsible for wiping out humanity by entering the plague-ridden Mohammedan city which he was obsessed with conquering. Because of that maniacal obsession, Raymond released the plague upon the world instead of listening to his people who feared exposing themselves to a deadly plague they might take home to their families.

In my adaptation, I granted Lionel his wish to grow into the Raymond character, assuming the role of the crusader who wins the battle at the expense of the entire world. That’s a more intensely driven and conflicted character than the original Lionel Verney, bemoaning his way through the book. I reworked the main character into someone everyone could easily relate to and understand how his humanity disintegrates and how radically his personality changes in the face of isolation and Raymond’s manias and bigotries that he ultimately embraces.

I think that’s way more compelling than listening to chapter after chapter of nostalgic musings and lamentations that makes me want to scream, "stop whining already and do something!". In my adaptation, Lionel Verney has a roller coaster of a character arc. I know, it’s more blasphemy to give Verney anything resembling a character arc but it’s my adaptation. I can choose to make it more interesting if I want to because I’m the guy responsible for making the movie.

ON THE OTHER CHARACTERS:
Where a book can have fifty or more than a hundred characters, the population of characters in a film can’t become a source of confusion when you can’t easily follow the story anymore. That meant compositing all of the similar characters into one that represents all of the redundant ones (even when writing a book, that‘s not a bad idea).

The overpopulation of relatives and acquaintances had to go too because they weren‘t necessary to the core story. Don’t forget, everything has to be distilled down to two-hours, so Perdita’s backstory can go too, and so can Perdita herself because anything tangential is not going to make the final cut of the film, much less get filmed. Those are the hard choices you have to make when adapting literature, or even editing a screenplay into a narrative medium as tightly condensed as a feature film. With only 100 or so minutes in a film, It's a matter of deciding which story points are important enough to dedicate to those precious few minutes.

Now just to complicate the story altogether, the characters had to be translated into modern English, speaking a completely different dialect, in a completely different part of the world where there are no “lords“ or royalty but we do have the next best thing - celebrity. In the book, Lionel Verney tends sheep as his day job but has more regal ambitions. In the adaptation, his day job is an orderly at a hospital with the ambirion of being a star baseball player.Same ideas, different environment.

ON EVADNE'S CHARACTER:
Rivaling Lord Raymond, Evadne is the other compelling character in the book. Passionate, dangerous, tragic and heroic, she eclipses every other woman in the story. In my adaptation, she embodies those qualities and is tied to the fate of the main character of the movie. Again, I moved the most compelling characters to the forefront of the movie - where they belong. That helps accelerate the glacial pace of the book into the momentum the movie has. Evadne still embodies the original themes expressed in the book but with a bit more power and cunning.

ON THE ENDING: (Spoiler Warning!)
The main character, as well as the audience, are led to believe that the last man is immune to the plague. This plays into the genre in order to separate the main character from the rest of the “Diseased”, which is typically the central conflict of this genre. But in the end, the main character discovers that he too is infected. His symptoms are unusually internal rather than external, although no less profound in effect.

The last man is no different than the rest of the surviving remnant of humanity who he has been exterminating. He has always been one of “them“, although he had deluded himself into believing that he was the chosen one, which turns the genre on its head.

My adaptation also features more action than someone might expect in a no-budget movie and that’s by design. Jingoism, dogma, ego, self-delusion and twisting religion often makes mass killing excusable, even justified in action movies as well as in the real world. I purposely indulge the story into quite a bit of this type of spree killing, as well as attempt to justify it all for an important reason. The shoot ’em up, kill ’em all phase of the movie is designed to desensitize and numb the conscience to how profoundly the plague has affected the main character. He’s just another person with the plague who believes that he is somehow better than everyone else who suffered various symptoms of the same disease, just like him.

By having Lionel Verney embrace Raymond's belief system, The Last Man becomes a metaphor for losing one's way and falling into the abyss of self-delusion. That's the parable.

This movie adaptation illustrates that anyone, from high school students and home-grown terrorists to dictators and presidents, can lose their way, if they ever begin to believe that they are the "chosen one" in whatever crusade or jihad seduces them into committing crimes against humanity or even a shooting spree. Mary Shelley's work embodies the trials of preserving our conscience and our humanity whenever we are tempted to believe that we are divinely justified to commit diabolic acts. That's why the adaptation ends with that theme clearly underscored.  

By the end of a mere two-hour movie, the audience may just find out how easy it is to rationalize genocide. That’s the Raymond character's pivotal theme which I chose to bring to the forefront of this feature film adaptation of Mary Shelley‘s “The Last Man“. It's a warning for the 21st century.

And as ambitious as all of this stuff was to pull off without a budget, it's done!. : )