Gary Whitta On AKIRA Problems; Says His Script Took Place In A Japanese-Owned Manhattan
In a new interview with Collider for the release of After Earth (his recent movie contribution) screenwriter Gary Whitta discussed the many problems the Live-Action Akira production had trying to "americanize” the manga.
The long promissed live-action version of the acclaimed manga Akira is surely one of the most problematics adaptations we've seen. The film had a long process of development, with Jaume Collet-Serra set as the director, Garrett Hedlund cast as Kaneda and Warner Bros. negotiating with actors like Gary Oldman, Helena Bonham Carter and others for roles. Unfortunately (or maybe it was for the best?) the studio stopped production for the adaptation in early 2012, saying that the script needed more work. Now there's no word on the project development, but I would say it is officialy stuck in development hell.
Even though the production is going nowhere so soon, one of the first screenwriters of the project, Gary Whitta (After Earth), sat down with Steve from Collider and shared some very interesting bits of information on some of the production developments of the movie. “I worked on it for about six months. And I pretty much lived on the lot with the director at the time, Ruairi Robinson, trying to work out that movie. It’s a tough movie; it’s hard to figure out how to do it below an R-rating. It’s a difficult movie, which deals with very mature subject matter; it’s hardcore.”
Akira is a 1988 Japanese animated cyberpunk science fiction film. It was written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, who based it on his manga of the same name. The film is set in a futuristic and post-war city, Neo-Tokyo, in 2019. The film's plot focuses on Shotaro Kaneda, a biker gang member, as he tries to stop Tetsuo Shima from releasing Akira. While most of the character designs and basic settings were adapted from the original 2182-page manga epic, the restructured plot of the movie differs considerably from the print version, pruning much of the last half of the manga. The film became a hugely popular cult film and is widely considered to be a landmark in Japanese animation and film making in general.