A History of Violence director David Cronenberg talked to ComingSoon.net about the big screen adaptation, which isn’t so much based on the graphic novel.
CS!: Did you read the graphic novel before reading the script or did you try to avoid it while making the movie to get your own look and feel?
Cronenberg: No, it was no influence whatsoever. It’s only because of the strange circumstances that I didn’t really know that the script was based on a graphic novel. It didn’t say it on the front page, and I got involved with the project and was working with New Line, then with Josh (Olsen) doing rewrites of the script. Somebody eventually mentioned the graphic novel and I said “What graphic novel?” I have no idea why I wasn’t told, but I said I guess I better read it, and I did. It took awhile for them to dig it up, because it was long out of print. I could see that although the basic premise was obviously the same, we had already gone off in a direction with the script, first because Josh had done it on his own and then I worked more that way with him—it went on a completely different direction from the novel to the extent that the novel really had nothing to offer me because it was just so different. That was basically it. I can’t really say, in a sense, creatively, that I had the experience of adapting a graphic novel, because it always felt like it was Josh’s original script to me. The visual elements of the novel were pretty irrelevant.
Click the link above for the full interview.
Source: ComingSoon.net
