A
live action feature length film based on the popular manga and anime film Akira
has been in the working for quite some time, it was even in the early stages of
production, with Tron’s Garrett Hedlund to play Kaneda, and with Kristen
Stewart, Gary Oldman and Helena Bonham Carter already casted but the studio though
that the script needed some more work on it and decided to stop production back
in early 2012.
In
a recent interview to collider, Gary Whitta, who beside the Akira adaptation
also worked in After Earth, starring Will and Jaden Smith, talked about the
adapting a story set in Japan to the USA.
“Speaking
with Steve, Whitta talked about his involvement with the Akira film and why it was so difficult to get it off
the ground:
“I
worked on it for about six months. And I pretty much lived on the lot with the
director at the time, Ruairi Robinson, trying to work out that movie. It’s a tough movie; it’s
hard to figure out how to do it below an R-rating. It’s a difficult movie, which
deals with very mature subject matter; it’s hardcore.”
In
addition to the rating issue, Whitta said that another difficulty in adapting
the manga was how to deal with the Americanization of the story:
“We
always dealt with the problem of, [and] I think what a lot of the fans felt was
problematic, was the westernization of it; [it’s like] “they’re never going to
make the $100 million movie with an all-Japanese cast. You need to westernize
it.” And that almost became kind of a joke—like, the idea of Shia LaBeouf as Tetsuo or whatever. People are going to have
a hard time with that, and certainly the fans.”
In
order to solve the problem of “westernizing” the film without completely
throwing out the Japanese setting, Whitta came up with a rather fascinating solution
that involved altering the story’s location quite drastically:
“We
came up with an idea that I actually thought was really cool; I don’t know if
it survived into future versions. It’s not New Manhattan—because that was the
[initial] idea, right? They moved it in to New Manhattan. I said, ‘it’s not New
Manhattan, it’s still New Tokyo but—this is going to sound weird—it’s actually
in Manhattan.’ What we did was, the idea is that there’d been a massive
economic crash in the United States and in our desperation, we sold Manhattan
Island to the Japanese, who were becoming a very powerful economic force, and
they were having an overpopulation problem, because Japan is a series of
islands, it can only accommodate so many people. So they just bought Manhattan
Island, and it became the fifth island of Japan, and they populated it. It
became New Tokyo, and it was just off the coast of the United States. So it was
Japanese territory, it wasn’t New Tokyo, but there were Americans who kind of
lived in little Americanized quarters of it. I felt it was a way to do a kind
of cool Western-Eastern fusion of the two ideas; not fully Japanese, not fully
westernized. Whether or not you’ll ever see that version, I don’t know, but I
thought that was kind of a cool solution to that problem of westernization of a
Japanese concept.””
Personally
the idea of America selling Manhattan to Japan, or the idea of a country selling part of itself to another is a very manga/anime sci-fi type thing,
and to be honest quite contemporary … (speak no more)
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