You mess around a bit with the vampire mythology though. ( MORE: “Pride & Prejudice & Zombies” Author Writing Burton’s “Dark Shadows”) It’s a very introspective and solitary existence being a vampire because everyone you know eventually dies. What would a 500- or a 1,000-year-old human mind be like? What would that person talk like? What would they have seen? You know, in the new Ridley Scott movie Prometheus, I find the character that Michael Fassbender plays, David, very fascinating because he’s not burdened by things like aging or dying, and when everyone else is in cryo-sleep he has the whole ship to himself and he chooses to watch Lawrence of Arabia and ride bicycles around the hangar bay. You can tell a large story that doesn’t necessarily have to be contained within a single century. I think vampires as characters are fascinating. It sounds like you’re more interested in the vampires than the vampire hunters, like the Buffys and the Blades. But there’s some aspirational quality to vampires. I think, all things being equal, none of us would choose to be a zombie or a werewolf. What I love about vampires and what makes them unique among horror characters is that they’re the only horror character that human beings generally aspire to be or would choose to be if given the choice. But more than the vampire literature specifically, I’m a fan of vampire movies. I’ve always, I think, like many people, just been attracted to the character, you know. When I was younger I loved some of the earlier Anne Rice books- Interview with a Vampire, The Vampire Lestat. I haven’t read the books, but if you can get that many millions of young people to read books, then I have no problem with you, regardless of what you write. There’s no Stephenie Meyer beef or anything. I think people try to make something of-like ‘well, you know, I did this book as a reaction to Twilight.’ That’s not accurate. You know, it’s not meant for-I’m a 36-year-old father and not really the target audience for Twilight. I’ve read that you said that the inspiration for the book came from seeing Twilight near Lincoln biographies. (READ: Richard Corliss’s review of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) And once I wrote an early draft of Lincoln, Tim was impressed and asked me to work on Dark Shadows. That mostly constituted sitting with Timur and sort of listening to Timur’s crazy take on the idea and transcribing as fast as I could and trying to keep up with his imagination. As soon as I turned in the manuscript, we got to work on adapting the book immediately. And they approached me together about turning Lincoln into a movie before I was even finished with the manuscript. He and had produced a movie called 9 together, an animated movie, so they were already producing partners. The way that I understand it Tim had heard of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and was interested in whether I had any other projects or ideas. Your working relationship with Tim Burton-did it start with Abraham Lincoln? Is that how you ended up doing the screenplay for Dark Shadows? So on one hand, it’s kind of astounding to me that a book with such a ridiculous premise got made into a big movie to begin with, and then got made into the kind of sort of insane, over-the-top movie that it is. It shouldn’t really be a big-studio summer movie. I mean it makes me laugh in a way, seeing how here’s a movie that, by all accounts, shouldn’t really exist. So that, coupled with the fact that I had to get my own author ego and the sense of ownership out of the way, made it pretty challenging.Īnd now that you’ve seen it onscreen, what was that like? I don’t really conceptualize the right big-action set pieces very well. It’s a high-octane summer action movie, and that didn’t come easily to me. The book is much more sort of about the minutiae of real history and how that interweaves with the vampire story, whereas the film is really just an all-out, over-the-top genre expression of an idea. Seth Grahame-Smith: It was a challenge because the book and the movie are so vastly different. TIME: What was it like to adapt your own book for the screen? Grahame-Smith spoke to TIME about learning to write a movie, adapting his own work and straying from the accepted vampire mythologies. On June 22, the film adaptation of his vampire book-now called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, with a colon-opens in theaters. Follow Grahame-Smith is perhaps best known for his mashup novels, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.
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