Adam Wingard Talks Trying To Translate 'Death Note'

Director Adam Wingard has taken some heat for his adaptation of “Death Note,” which takes the Japanese manga and transports the story to the United States. The filmmaker has defended his movie, saying it’s a “fresh story,” and the approach is not unlike Martin Scorsese reconfiguring his remake of “The Departed” into a Boston-set story. Now, in an interview with IGN, Wingard reveals the difficulty he had in trying to bring the narrative stateside, and it resulted in making changes to the characters.

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“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,” he explained. “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. What are the things that people chalk up to conspiracy theories? What kind of weird underground programs does the government have? How do those work in the world of ‘Death Note’ ?”

As Wingard worked to bring the story stateside, it inevitably meant figuring out the core theme and then building out from there. Fans should not expect complete fidelity to the source material.

“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,” Wingard said. “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.”

Whether it works or not we’ll find out when “Death Note” lands on Netflix on August 25th.