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I AM LEGEND

Director Rob Bowman on Adapting Richard Matheson

By Edward Gross

Rob Bowman honed his skills as a director on a variety of episodic television fare, being one of the first directors to help establish a sense of identity for Star Trek: The Next Generation and playing an integral role in the visual development of The X-Files.

Last year, Bowman directed the big-screen version The X-Files, which pulled in nearly $200 million at the box office, and while he helmed several episodes of the series this season, he has set his sights on the feature-film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Originally to be directed by Ridley Scott, and set to star Arnold Schwarzengger, the film is currently awaiting a greenlight from Warner Bros. While Bowman – signed for the project – awaits word from the studio, he discussed his hopes for the film with Vampires & Slayers.

Vampires & Slayers: The obvious way to start is to find out the status of the project.

ROB BOWMAN: Basically it’s in the decision stage of whether or not to greenlight it. The script has been presented to the studio and to Arnold, and we have to wait for Warner Bros. to decide if they want to go forward or not. It’s a co-production between Warner Bros. and Bel Aire and Bel Aire has offered to greenlight their half of it, and they’re waiting for Warners.

RB: Yeah. There were several movies at Warners that were overbudget, and this was one of them. But I had a take on the idea that just wasn’t as expensive as the other one. A different way to tell the story that didn’t happen to be as expensive.

 V&S: I was surprised, though delighted, to hear your name attached.

 RB: Why?

 V&S: Because it was going to be a Ridley Scott movie, and suddenly your name was attached to it.

 RB: When I first heard about the project, I also heard about it as a Ridley Scott project with Arnold Schwarzenegger and I said, "That sounds great, can’t wait to see it." Then my agent brings it up again as an open assignment and I said, "What happened to Ridley Scott?" and he said, "He’s off of it." "Can you get me a meeting?" Went through a series of meetings, got a contract and I’m on it.

 V&S: Had you been familiar with the Richard Matheson novel?

 RB: Oh yeah, as well as the previous adaptations [The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man].

 V&S: What was it about the material that appealed you; that made you say, "I want on this"?

 RB: The point of view is very clear as to what it would be like to be the last man alive on earth. That’s the attractive thing to me; the survivability, trying to maintain sanity and what would happen to an ill-equipped person if they happened to end up through attrition and random selection to be the last person alive – how would they do it? To tell you the truth, vampires are not something I’m terribly interested in in filmmaking. So I’ve actually tried to work away from the vampire-ghoul aspect, and focus on this man. The first draft of my version, I didn't have Cortman, the villain, speaking at all. He went from waxing poetic to nothing. In the end we’ll probably end up with him speaking some, but not as much as he used to. The truth is, we haven’t finished it yet. We’re not going to go forward until the studio tells us what they want to do with the movie and the script. Also, the visuals seemed really interesting: isolation, the underground. But the real appeal was the inner-life of someone who is the last person alive.

RB: Absolutely. I’m not interested in making Night of the Living Dead, which was George Romero’s version of this book. That’s certainly one way to do the movie – instead of making them a hippie cult, just make them an unstoppable force of ghouls. A very simple opponent – you can’t kill them, they’re already dead. That’s one way to do it, but I just wasn’t interested in that.

The X-Files’ Kim Manners, David Duchovny and Rob Bowman

RB: We’re still dealing with vampires. Blood is very rare commodity for these people. They are trying to repopulate the world. It’s very tricky to do because vampires, by definition, have to define themselves through their actions, as does anybody, and so if they have to define themselves by what they do they’re vampires. I basically avoided spending more time with them than I needed to.

RB: That’s their problem. If there’s too many of them and nothing to feed on, they don’t survive.

 V&S: Does the blood of Robert Neville hold the possibility of some kind of cure?

RB: Yes, and he also has access to blood supply that they need, but he doesn’t want to give it up, because he’s hoping to repopulate the world with human beings – if he can find them.

 V&S: Did you ever go back to The Last Man on Earth or The Omega Man?

 RB: I watched The Omega Man recently and the impressions I had of it were far greater than the movie itself. It was fairly poorly lit and seemed kind of clunky and stupid. But it still made a lasting impression from my childhood. It’s the idea that captured me, so how do I translate that idea for audiences of the ‘90s? I’m not done yet. I haven’t figured out yet quite how to finish telling the story, but we’ve come a long way. We’ve focused it down to his point of view. Before there were quite a few exterior visuals that dealt with the condition of the earth. But I wasn’t interested in that; it didn’t feel like the center of the idea. So I stuck more with being inside this guy’s head, his day to day routine and not just blowing his own head off to get it over with.

 V&S: The most interesting parts of The Omega Man were things like Heston playing chess with himself, going to the movies by himself – that day to day living.

RB: There’s also the liberties of being left alone – going into a grocery store and taking what you need, or going to a museum and maybe taking a few paintings off a wall and bringing them home. Money means nothing, so going into a bank and taking a stack of money is meaningless. But there would be liberties to being the last person alive. The other challenge is creating science that makes it seem believable that this could actually happen, and therefore all the more terrifying.

 V&S: Are the vampires created through a scientific mishap?

RB: The idea sort of comes from how viruses are building up immunities to our antibiotics and making super-viruses. These people are that -- they become the side effect of an antidote for a virus. Basically there’s a world plague and somebody comes up with an antidote for it, except the antidote has side effects which is that they basically create super-viruses and makes these people into vampires. I don’t want to be more specific than that.

RB: No, their physiology is altered.

RB: I’ve certainly been practicing visualization of oddities on The X-Files for six years. It’s the idea of making things seem as real as possible. I believe that the previous draft of the script was a bit more fantastic. We have to take a science fiction idea, push it forward a few years in time and then create a world in which you’ve got a realistic environment as a result of the crisis. How far do you take the overgrowth? Bringing the animals back into town, bringing the ivy growing inside and outside buildings. The condition of Neville’s home, which I took to be much more of a survivalist enclave as opposed to a high-tech, stainless steel environment that it used to be. Much grittier and much more soldier-like. So I actually took it down quite a bit from what it used to be. It used to be pretty snappy and I just felt it wasn’t realistic; that it wasn’t as edgy. I guess I want to make things as difficult for him as I possibly could. State of mind is such an important part of the character, and the willingness to get up and go forth every day. I did not make him into a killing machine. I made him into a very tortured soul. A man who was struggling with the day to day and a reason to keep going.

RB: But if he’s not as pumped up as he usually is, and he’s hardened in his eyes and has sort of become stoic, then you take it on as the reason he’s the last man alive is he’s so hearty. But I use the physical shell as just the reason he survived. Internally, emotionally, he’s struggling. The task is to find a way to express his thoughts and feelings with as little dialogue as possible; more situational and, when needed, with first person narration in real time. You just tailor it to whoever you’ve got. Arnold was on the project when I arrived, and I thought, "Well, I can certainly do it with him and I can do it with someone else," but he’s here and it sounds like it could be very interesting with him. I’ve spoken to him quite a bit, and he’s very much in to this approach to the film.

RB: Oh, it is. He is definitely in the process of trying some new things in his career. He’s doing some old things that he’s used to doing, and he’s trying to branch out into new stuff. Don’t get me wrong, there will be plenty of Arnold kicking vampire ass, but I’m not just making it a murderfest from start to finish.

RB: We’ve got lots of that – playing with the sun, the clock and shadows. And making night not being the only time you see these people. Basically dark is where these people can live, so as the shadows start to set from buildings and through underground tunnels or whatnot, you can have suicide squads coming up through the sewer system trying to kill Neville, which, visually, is a pretty terrifying image – busting out of manhole covers, running toward you basically on fire. I tried to expand the amount of time that it’s possible for these people to cause death and terror.

RB: The spirit of the novel is very much the core of the movie. As a matter of fact, in the previous draft nothing from the novel was there. But you have to remember that the book is a very small story – it’s like an episode of Twilight Zone. In order to become a movie, you have to expand, extrapolate and do a great deal of invention just to make it into a movie. But I went back to the book and tried to get a sense of what was the charm and heart of it, and will try to get that up on screen.

For more on I Am Legend, order Vampires & Slayers #1 by sending a check or money order for $8.00 ($6.95 cover price, $1.05 postage) to RetroVision, 1036A Park Blvd, Suite 103, Massapequa Park, NY 11762.

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