Death Note Movie Director Explains Why Film’s Context Changes Its Characters

There were a lot of mixed reactions when Netflix released the first Death Note live-action movie. Based on the preview alone, fans could tell that there would be a lot of differences between Adam Wingar'ds Death Note film adaptation and the original manga series and anime and while some are open to these differences, others feel like the production strayed too far from the source material.

Now, in an interview with IGN, Wingard reveals the liberties he took with the film's setting and its context, saying that he not only changed the setting and a few names but the characters as well.

In the interview the director explains how the manga's Japanese feel wouldn't fit with the film's American setting, admitting the vast cultural and societal differences between both countries. Wingard had to reimagine the characters and the context so the film could fit more naturally in its setting.

"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."

"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. 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."

Though some fans might find these changes disconcerting, a Death Note film adaptation different from the source material may not necessarily be a bad thing. Wingard does have a point in saying that the source material's Japanese background doesn't really fit in with its American setting and adjusting the film to fit this would give the film a more realistic tone. Let's just wait and see how everything turns out.

Death Note hits Netflix on August 25, 2017.

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