Development
Washington Square on October 31, 2006: the area is being set up for an evening shooting. In the background is the house Will Smith's character lives in.
Actors
Tom Cruise,
Michael Douglas,
[8] and
Mel Gibson[6] had been considered to star in the film,
[8] using a script by Protosevich and with
Ridley Scott as director; however, by June 1997 the studio's preference was for actor
Arnold Schwarzenegger. In July, Scott and Schwarzenegger finalized negotiations,
[9] with production slated to begin the coming September,
[8] using
Houston as a stand-in for the film's setting of
Los Angeles.
[10] Scott had Protosevich replaced by a screenwriter of his own choosing,
John Logan, with whom he spent months of intensive work on a number of different drafts. The Scott/Logan version of
I Am Legend was a bold, artistic mash of scifi action and psychological thriller, without dialogue in the first hour and with a sombre ending.
[6] The creatures in Logan's
Legend were similar to the Darkseekers of the finished film in their animalistic, barbaric nature. The studio, fearing its lack of commercial appeal and merchandising potential, began to worry about the liberties they had given Scott – then on a negative streak of box office disappointments – and urged the production team to reconsider the lack of action in the screenplay. After an "esoteric" draft by writer
Neal Jimenez, Warner Bros. reassigned Protosevich to the project, reluctantly working with Scott again.
[6]
In December 1997, the project was called into question when the projected budget escalated to $108 million due to media and shareholder scrutiny of the studio in financing a big-budget film.
[11] Scott rewrote the script in an attempt to reduce the film's budget by $20 million,
[12] but in March 1998, the studio canceled the project due to continued budgetary concerns,
[13] and quite possibly to the box office disappointment of Scott's last three films,
1492: Conquest of Paradise,
White Squall, and
G.I. Jane.
[6] Likewise, Schwarzenegger's recent films at the time (
Eraser and Warner Bros. own
Batman & Robin) underperformed, and the studio's latest experiences with big budget sci-fi movies
Sphere and
The Postman were negative as well.
[6] In August 1998, director
Rob Bowman was attached to the project,
[14] with Protosevich hired to write a third all-new draft, far more action-oriented than his previous versions,
[6] but the director (who reportedly wished for
Nicolas Cage to play the lead) moved on to direct
Reign of Fire[15] and the project did not get off the ground.
In March 2002, Schwarzenegger became the producer of
I Am Legend, commencing negotiations with
Michael Bay to direct and
Will Smith to star in the film.
[16] Bay and Smith were attracted to the project based on a redraft that would reduce its budget.
[17] However, the project was shelved due to Warner Bros. president,
Alan F. Horn's dislike of the script.
[18] In 2004,
Akiva Goldsman was asked by head of production Jeff Robinov to produce the film.
[19] In September 2005, director
Francis Lawrence signed on to helm the project, with production slated to begin in 2006.
Guillermo del Toro was originally approached to direct by Smith but turned it down in order to direct
Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
[20] Lawrence, whose film
Constantine was produced by Goldsman, was fascinated by empty urban environments. He said, "Something's always really excited me about that... to have experienced that much loss, to be without people or any kind of social interaction for that long."
[19]
Goldsman took on the project as he admired the second
I Am Legend film adaptation,
The Omega Man.
[21] A rewrite was done to distance the project from the other
zombie films inspired by the novel,
[16] as well as from the recently released
28 Days Later, although Goldsman was inspired by the scenes of a deserted
London in the British horror film to create the scenes of a deserted
New York City.
[21] A forty-page scene-by-scene outline of the film was developed by May 2006. When delays occurred on Smith's film
Hancock, which was scheduled for 2007, it was proposed to switch the actor's films. This meant filming would have to begin in sixteen weeks: production was green lit, using Goldsman's script and the outline.
[19] Elements from Protosevich's script were introduced, while the crew consulted with experts on infectious diseases and
solitary confinement.
[21] Rewrites continued throughout filming, because of Smith's improvisational skills and Lawrence's preference to keep various scenes silent.
[19] The director had watched Jane Campion’s film
The Piano with a low volume so as to not disturb his newborn son, and realized that silence could be very effective cinema.
[22]
[edit]Casting
Will Smith signed on to play Robert Neville in April 2006.
[23] He said he took on
I Am Legend because he felt it could be like "
Gladiator[or]
Forrest Gump—these are movies with wonderful, audience-pleasing elements but also uncompromised artistic value. [This] always felt like it had those possibilities to me."
[21] The actor found Neville to be his toughest acting challenge since portraying
Muhammad Aliin
Ali (2001). He said that "when you're on your own, it is kind of hard to find conflict." The film's dark tone and exploration of whether Neville has gone insane during his isolation meant Smith had to restrain himself from falling into a humorous routine during takes.
[24] To prepare for his role, Smith visited the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in
Georgia. He also met with a person who had been in solitary confinement and a former
prisoner of war.
[25] Smith compared Neville to
Job, who lost his children, livelihood, and health. Like the
Book of Job,
I Am Legend studies the questions, "Can he find a reason to continue? Can he find the hope or desire to excel and advance in life? Or does the death of everything around him create imminent death for himself?"
[16] He also cited an influence in
Tom Hanks' performance in
Cast Away (2000).
[21]
Abbey and Kona, both three-year-old
German Shepherd Dogs, played Neville's dog Sam.
[26] The rest of the supporting cast consists of
Salli Richardson as Zoe, Robert's wife,
[27] and
Alice Braga as a survivor named Anna.
[27] Willow Smith, Will Smith's daughter, makes her film debut as Marley, Neville's daughter.
[28] Emma Thompson has an uncredited role as Dr. Alice Krippin, who appears on television explaining her vaccine for cancer that mutates into the virus.
[29] Singer
Mike Patton provided the guttural screams of the infected "hemocytes," and
Dash Mihok provided the character animation for the infected "alpha male". There were several filler characters with uncredited roles in old news broadcasts and flashbacks, such as the unnamed President's voice, and the cast of
The Today Show.
[edit]Filming
Akiva Goldsman decided to move the story from
Los Angeles to
New York City to take advantage of locations that would more easily show emptiness.
[7] Goldsman explained, "L.A. looks empty at three o'clock in the afternoon, [but] New York is never empty . . . it was a much more interesting way of showing the windswept emptiness of the world."
[24] Warner Bros. initially rejected this idea because of the logistics,
[19] but Francis Lawrence was determined to shoot on location, to give the film a natural feel that would benefit from not shooting on soundstages. Lawrence went to the city with a
camcorder, and filmed areas filled with crowds. Then, a special effects test was conducted to remove all those people. The test had a powerful effect on studio executives.
[22] Michael Tadross convinced authorities to close busy areas such as the
Grand Central Terminal viaduct, several blocks of
Fifth Avenue and
Washington Square Park.
[19] The film was shot primarily in the
anamorphic format, with flashback scenes shot in
Super 35.
[30]
Filming began on September 23, 2006.
[31] The Marcy Avenue Armory in Williamsburg was used for the interior of Neville's home,
[24] while
Greenwich Village was used for the exterior.
[16] Other locations include the Tribeca section of Lower Manhattan, the aircraft carrier
Intrepid, the
Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx and St. Patrick's Cathedral.
[7] Weeds were imported from
Florida and were strewn across locations to make the city look like it had overgrown with them.
[19] The closure of major streets was controversial with New Yorkers. Will Smith said, "I don't think anyone's going to be able to do that in New York again anytime soon. People were not happy. That's the most middle fingers I've ever gotten in my career."
[16]
A bridge scene was filmed for six consecutive nights in January on the
Brooklyn Bridge to serve as a flashback scene in which New York's citizens evacuate the city. Shooting the scene consumed $5 million of the film's reported $150 million budget, which was likely the most expensive shot in the city to date. The scene, which had to meet requirements from 14 government agencies, involved 250 crew members and 1,000 extras, including 160 National Guard members.
[32][33] Also present were several
Humvees, three
Strykers, a 110-foot (34 m)
cutter, a 41-foot (12 m)
utility boat, and two 25-foot (7.6 m) Response Boat Small craft, as well as other vehicles including taxis, police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances.
[34] Filming concluded on March 31, 2007.
[31] CGI was used to depict the main spans of the Brooklyn Bridge and the
Manhattan Bridge collapsing as
missiles from over passing military jets blew them up to quarantine Manhattan island.
Reshoots were conducted around November 2007. Lawrence noted, "We weren't seeing fully rendered shots until about a month ago. The movie starts to take on a whole other life. It's not until later that you can judge a movie as a whole and go, 'Huh, maybe we should shoot this little piece in the middle, or tweak this a little bit.' It just so happened that our re-shoots revolved around the end of the movie."
[35]
[edit]Effects
A week into filming, Francis felt the infected (referred to as "Dark Seekers" or "hemocytes" in the script), who were being portrayed by actors wearing prosthetics, were not convincing. His decision to use
computer-generated imagery (CGI) resulted in an increased budget and extended
post-production, although the end results were not always well received.
[36][37] The concept behind the infected was that their
adrenal glands were open all of the time and Lawrence explained, "They needed to have an abandon in their performance that you just can’t get out of people in the middle of the night when they’re barefoot. And their metabolisms are really spiked, so they’re constantly
hyperventilating, which you can’t really get actors to do for a long time or they pass out."
[19] The actors remained on set to provide
motion capture.
[24][38] "The film's producers and sound people wanted the creatures in the movie to sound somewhat human, but not the standard," so
Mike Patton, lead singer of
Faith No More, was engaged to provide the screams and howls of the infected.
[39]
In addition, CGI was used for the
lions and
deer in the film, and to erase pedestrians in shots of New York. Workers visible in windows, spectators and moving cars in the distance were all removed. In his vision of an empty New York, Lawrence cited
John Ford as his influence: "We didn't want to make an apocalyptic movie where the landscape felt apocalyptic. A lot of the movie takes place on a beautiful day. There's something magical about the empty city as opposed to dark and scary that was the ideal that the cast and crew wanted."
[21]
[edit]Alternate ending
Several scenes were changed before the film's release, especially the stand-off between Neville and the infected in his laboratory. In the alternate ending, the alpha male makes a butterfly-shaped smear on the glass. Neville realizes that the alpha male is identifying the woman he was experimenting on by a butterfly tattoo, and that the alpha male wants her back. Neville puts his gun down and returns the infected woman. Neville and the alpha male then exchange stares; Neville apologizes to the Darkseekers; the alpha male acknowledges his apology, and the infected leave. Shocked by the ordeal, Neville sits down for a moment in his laboratory. Looking over the pictures of his numerous test subjects, the implications of his research methods begin to dawn on him. The final shot follows Neville, Anna, and Ethan as they drive away towards Vermont with the antidote.
[40]
According to visual effects supervisor Janek Sirrs: "At that point, Neville's — and the audience's — assumptions about the nature of these creatures are shown to be incorrect. We see that they have actually retained some of their humanity. There is a very important moment between the alpha male and Neville."
[edit]Release
I Am Legend was originally slated for a November 21, 2007 release in the United States and Canada,
[41] but was delayed to December 14, 2007.
[42] The film opened on December 26, 2007 in the United Kingdom,
[43] and the
Republic of Ireland having been originally scheduled for January 4, 2008.
[24]
In December 2007, China banned the release of American films in the country,
[44] which is believed to have delayed the release of
I Am Legend. Will Smith spoke to the chairman of
China Film Group about securing a release date, later explaining, "We struggled very, very hard to try to get it to work out, but there are only a certain amount of foreign films that are allowed in."
[25]
[edit]Marketing
A tie-in comic from
DC Comics and
Vertigo Comics has been created,
I Am Legend: Awakening.
[45] The project draws upon collaboration from
Bill Sienkiewicz, screenwriter Mark Protosevich, and author
Orson Scott Card. The son of the original book's author, Richard Christian Matheson, also collaborated on the project. The project will advance from the comic to an online format in which animated featurettes (created by the team from
Broken Saints) will be shown on the official website.
[46]
In October 2007, Warner Bros. Pictures in conjunction with the Electric Sheep Company launched the online multiplayer game
I Am Legend: Survival in the virtual world
Second Life. The game is the largest launched in the virtual world in support of a film release, permitting people to play against each other as the infected or the uninfected across a replicated 60 acres (240,000 m
2) of New York City.
[47] The studio also hired the ad agency Crew Creative to develop a website that would be specifically viewable on the
iPhone.
[48]
[edit]Box office
I Am Legend grossed $77,211,321 on its opening weekend in 3,606 theaters, averaging $21,412 per venue, and placing it at the top of the box office. This set a record for highest grossing opening for a film for the month of December.
[49] The film grossed $256,393,010 in North America and $585,349,010 worldwide.
[1] The film was the sixth highest grossing film of 2007 in North America, and as of April 2010 stands among the top 100 all-time highest grossing films both
domestically and
worldwide (unadjusted for ticket price inflation).
[1]
[edit]Home media
The film was released on DVD on March 18, 2008 in two editions: a one-disc release, including the movie with four animated comics ("Death As a Gift," "Isolation," "Sacrificing the Few for the Many," and "Shelter"), and other
DVD-ROM features; and a two-disc special edition that includes all these extras, an alternative theatrical version of the movie with an alternate ending,
[50] and a
digital copy of the film.
[51] On the high-definition end, the movie has been released on the
Blu-ray Disc format and
HD DVD format along with the DVD release; with the HD-DVD version being released later on April 8, 2008.
[52] Both HD releases include all the features available in the two-disc DVD edition.
[52] A three-disk Ultimate Collector's Edition was also released on December 9, 2008.
[53]
The film has sold 7.04 million DVDs and earned $126.2 million in revenue, making it the sixth best-selling DVD of 2008.
[54] However, Warner Bros was reportedly "a little disappointed" with the film's performance on the DVD market.
[55]
[edit]Soundtrack
|
|
1. | "My Name Is Robert Neville" | 2:50 |
2. | "Deer Hunting" | 1:16 |
3. | "Evacuation" | 4:26 |
4. | "Scan Her Again" | 1:41 |
5. | "Darkseeker Dogs" | 2:16 |
6. | "Sam's Gone" | 1:45 |
7. | "Talk To Me" | 0:55 |
8. | "The Pier" | 5:17 |
9. | "Can They Do That?" | 2:09 |
10. | "I'm Listening" | 2:09 |
11. | "The Jagged Edge" | 5:15 |
12. | "Reunited" | 7:49 |
13. | "I'm Sorry" | 2:21 |
14. | "Epilogue" | 4:13 |
Total length:
| 44:00 |
|
[edit]Critical reception and awards
Reviews were generally favorable.
[56] The consensus among favorable reviews was that Will Smith's performance overcame questionable special effects.
[57] Review aggregate website
Rotten Tomatoes reported that 70% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on 204 reviews.
[58] At the similar website
Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 to each review, the film has received an
average score of 65, based on 37 reviews.
[59]
A. O. Scott wrote that Will Smith gave a "graceful and effortless performance" and also noted the "third-act collapse". He felt that the movie "does ponder some pretty deep questions about the collapse and persistence of human civilization".
[60] Dana Stevens of
Slatewrote that the movie lost its way around the hour mark, noting that "the Infected just aren't that scary."
[29] NPR critic Bob Mondello noted the film's subtext concerning global
terrorism and that this aspect made the film fit in perfectly with other, more direct cinematic explorations of the subject.
[61] Richard Roeper gave the film a positive review on the television program
At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper, commending Will Smith as being in "prime form," also saying there are "some amazing sequences" and that there was "a pretty heavy screenplay for an action film."
[62] The film has been criticized for diverging from Matheson's novel, especially in its portrayal of a specifically
Christian theme.
[63] Much of the negative criticism has concerned the film's third
act,
[36][37][64] some critics favoring the alternative ending in the
DVD release.
[50]
Popular Mechanics published an article on December 14, 2007
[65] addressing some of the scientific issues raised by the film:
- the rate of deterioration of urban structures, infrastructure, and survival of fauna and flora
- the plausibility of a retrovirus spreading out of control as depicted in the film. (The measles virus depicted in the film, however, is not a retrovirus, but is in fact a part of the Paramyxovirus family.)
- the mechanics of the Brooklyn Bridge's destruction
The magazine solicited reactions from
Alan Weisman, author of
The World Without Us,
virologist W. Ian Lipkin,
M.D., and Michel Bruneau,
PhD, comparing their predictions with the film's depictions. The article raised the most questions regarding the virus' mutation and the medical results, and pointed out that a
suspension bridge like the Brooklyn Bridge would likely completely collapse rather than losing only its middle span. Neville's method of producing power using gasoline-powered generators seemed the most credible: "This part of the tale is possible, if not entirely likely,"
Popular Mechanics editor Roy Berendsohn says.
[edit]Possible sequel/prequel
Francis Lawrence said in late 2008 that there would be a prequel and that Will Smith would be reprising his role. He stated that the film would reveal what happens to Neville before the infected take over New York.
D. B. Weiss was recruited to write the script, while Lawrence would direct "if we figure out the story". Smith stated the film would have Neville and his team going from
New York City to
Washington, D.C. and back again, as they made their last stand.
[71] The film would again explore the premise of what it's like to be alone, as Lawrence explained, "... the tough thing is, how do we do that again and in a different way?"
[72]
On May 3, 2011, Francis Lawrence stated that, so far as it involved him, the prequel was dead, with Lawrence stating, "I don't think that's ever going to happen."
[73]
In 2012, Warner Brothers announced that deals had been made to produce "another installment" (not the rumored prequel), with the intention of having Will Smith reprise his role.
[74]