Leave The World Behind Director Defends Changing The Book (& Says Every Adaptation Should Do It)

Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Leave the World Behind!

Leave the World Behind director Sam Esmail has defended the changes he made to the film adaptation of the book, even saying every adaptation should do the same thing. The new Netflix original film follows two families brought together through circumstance during a nationwide cyberattack. While the film has the same premise as author Rumaan Alam’s original novel, significant changes like character roles and a clearer explanation on what’s happening become key parts of the movie.

Speaking on The Big Picture Podcast, Esmail defended the changes Leave the World Behind made to the book version, even saying every adaptation of something should embrace a similar mindset. The director underscored how, in a different medium, changes need to be made so an adaptation resonates with its new audience. Check out what Esmail had to say below:

One of the things I want to say: you guys talk about Killers of the Flower Moon and how different it was from the book. I am not a fan of people necessarily adapting something from another medium in this one-to-one ratio. It shouldn’t work! It’s so great in the medium for a reason. And when you think about it in terms of – especially if you go into a cinematic medium – you have to recontextualize it. You have to figure out a different way to mine the same character, the interior lives of these characters, or the visual language of the book. You have to find a way to reconstruct it. If you do this one-to-one thing, I think 9 times out of 10 you’re gonna fail. So I was very up front with Rumaan [Alam] about that. So I called him before I called Julia [Roberts], of course, I called him and I said, ‘Here are the ideas.’ And it was basically the things I started picturing in my head the second time I write it, were all those setpieces.

More to come…