Netflix’s upcoming live-action Death Note movie features the iconic apple-loving Shinigami, Ryuk, but the rest of the cast and setting deviate greatly from the source material. In an interview with IGN, director Adam Wingard explained just what retelling Death Note in the United States means for the story and its characters.
“In the early stages of the film I was rereading all of the manga, really just looking at how does any of this translate to the United States. Ultimately, Death Note is such a Japanese thing. You can't just say let's port this over and it's going to all add up. They're two different worlds completely.
“Ultimately, whenever I say it’s about America, I’m looking at it like, what are the main kind of core issues going on in America,” Wingard said. “What are the things that people chalk up to conspiracy theories? What kind of weird underground programs does the government have? How do I those work into the world of Death Note?”
The original manga and anime star Light Yagami, a student in Tokyo who finds the otherworldly Death Note and uses it to eliminate criminals. Him and the prodigy detective, L, enter a battle of wits as Light hides his acts behind the codename Kira. Wingard’s Death Note stars Light Turner, who also comes across the Death Note and L, but in Seattle, Washington. These major changes from the source material have caused some controversy among fans, but Wingard explained that the direct adaption of the story in an American setting didn’t work well.
Light Turner versus Light Yagami are two very different people.
“It’s one of those things where the harder I tried to stay 100 percent true to the source material, the more it just kind of fell apart… You’re in a different country, you’re in a different kind of environment, and you’re trying to also summarize a sprawling series into a two-hour-long film. For me, it became about what do these themes mean to modern day America, and how does that affect how we tell the story. Ultimately, the cat and mouse chase between Light and L, the themes of good, evil, and what’s in between the gray area. Those are the core things of Death Note, and that’s really what we went for.”
With the location change, Wingard also said that the characters’ personalities also received major changes – Light Turner and Light Yagami may share the same first name, but they’re very different people.
“At its core, it’s taking the themes of who the characters are but it's exploring them in a new context. Ultimately the personalities of the characters a quite a bit different… L isn't the same. There are a lot of similarities — he likes candy, sometimes he romps around with his shoes off. Those kinds of things, but at the end of the day the take on L and the escalation of his character is very different,” Wingard said. “He’s still a weirdo. It's the same for almost all the characters across the board. Probably the only character that comes off as the same way as he does in the anime is Ryuk.”
Wingard is also using the change in location to alter the history of some of the characters, most notably L's.
"One of the most exciting things for me is to take L’s backstory and flesh that out in the context of underground, clandestine American operations, programs, and things of that nature," Wingard said. "In a way, it’s sort of like taking the world that The Guest – my other film which kind of goes into super soldier creation programs and things like that – it’s kind of taking those type of concepts and expanding it and saying what does that mean in the context of this film."
The Death Note movie premieres on Netflix on August 25. Stay tuned for additional Death Note news from our interview with Wingard, and check out the new Ryuk poster Wingard revealed on his Twitter earlier this week.
Miranda Sanchez is an Editor at IGN. You can chat with her about video games and anime on Twitter.
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