On Director David Cronenberg: “I’d been hired by New Line to adapt the script and wrote my first draft of it, and they started going around to directors - and it’s all the same to you [as a writer]. You don’t get to pick who directs the film, obviously.
They were really happy with the script and I thought it was the best thing I had written. You’re kicking around sort of your dream team. Like, ‘Who would be the best person to do this?’ I would say David’s one of my two or three favorite living directors but I’d never occurred to me to throw his name out because a) it didn’t really feel a grand thematic [fit]. It felt like, you know, it sort of fits in with his stuff but it really doesn’t. You don’t immediately think ‘Cronenberg.’ Besides that, he’d also been kind of off making smaller, more independent, kind of much artier fare. I had no idea he was looking to kind of come back in and do this stuff.
I got a phone call from New Line that David Cronenberg wanted to do this film and I thought they were joking. I know these guys and I figure they were thinking like, ‘Let’s screw with him.’ ‘No, really we got some hack. I was just telling you that.’ I couldn’t believe it. It was beyond my wildest hope and expectation. And then he came into town to meet with New Line and talk about the job and he and I had lunch. We got along great.
We went through the script and talked about changes that he wanted to make. We went back and forth, which was an absolutely amazing experience because I was perfectly prepared for him to come in and Cronenbergize it, if you want. And his only interest was taking the script and making it the best version of the story that it could possibly be. And he had some tremendous ideas, and it was a great, great experience. We were using that script as a launching pad and there were some significant changes made, but it’s still very much the essence of what I had written originally.
Josh Olson on the Difficulties of Adapting a Graphic Novel: “There’s a lot of different things to take into account, I guess. On a kind of pace level, there’s the familiarity of it.
If I was adapting ‘Harry Potter,’ I would have an obligation to the 15 million people who are going to kill me if I radically change something. If it’s a graphic novel like this, which was read by… I mean I actually read it when it came out, but almost - statistically speaking - nobody had even heard of the book. It’s a smaller printed DC novel. You don’t have that on this. It’s not like this big audience that would be angry at you.
I don’t know. (Laughing) I guess I was pretty irresponsible. I’d read the book and it’s a terrific story. It just didn’t focus on a story I was interested in. …It kind of suggested to me themes and ideas that I was interested in. I thought, ‘Screw that! I’ll pitch that and see what they think.’ And they responded.
I feel like Alan Moore seems to have the right idea about this stuff. It’s like his book is his book and whatever the h**l they do with the movie is something else entirely. So I guess the question is, ‘Do you have an obligation to be faithful to the book and what does that mean? Does that mean we do it verbatim? Does that mean we keep the ideas?’ I guess my answer is I sort of felt like, the book is out there if you love the book. And yeah, it’s not like we’re colorizing it or something, or doing something that can’t be reversed. So, you know, the book is still there. I’m not screwing around with it. You can like that. You can like this. You can like both of them, but I’m ducking the question, I guess…”
Page 2: Josh Olson on Viggo Mortensen and What Didn't Make It Into "A History of Violence"
