Leave the World Behind director defends major differences between book and movie

Leave the World Behind director Sam Esmail has defended his decision to change several elements in his film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel.

Esmail’s latest apocalyptic thriller about a society’s collapse due to a nationwide cyberattack stars Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts as a couple who take their two children Rose and Archie (Farrah Mackenzie and Charlie Evans), on a weekend getaway to Long Island, New York.

While there, the owner of their luxurious rental home, GH Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la Herrold) return to the property under mysterious circumstances, claiming that a calamitous event has rocked the city.

While the movie maintains the same premise as the original best-selling novel, it contains a few significant changes to the characters and its plot.

Speaking on The Big Picture Podcast, Esmail admitted that he’s typically “not a fan of people necessarily adapting something from another medium in this one-to-one ratio. It shouldn’t work! It’s so great in the medium for a reason”.

However, he added: “When you think about it in terms of — especially if you go into a cinematic medium — you have to recontextualise it. You have to figure out a different way to mine the same character, the interior lives of these characters, or the visual language of the book. You have to find a way to reconstruct it. If you do this one-to-one thing, I think nine times out of 10 you’re gonna fail.

“So I was very upfront with Rumaan [Alam] about that. So I called him before I called Julia [Roberts], of course, I called him and I said, ‘Here are the ideas’,” he continued. “And it was basically the things I started picturing in my head the second time I wrote it, were all those setpieces.”

One obvious change from the book is that of the relationship between GH and Ruth. In the novel, Ruth is GH’s wife, while in the film, Ruth is his young adult daughter and his wife is supposed to be on a flight home.

The movie’s ending is also a departure from Alam’s novel. In the latter, Rose is gathering supplies from the house before presumably returning to her family. Esmail, however, decided to end the film on a humorous note with Rose finally sitting down to watch the final episode of Friends, the thing she’s been obsessing over the entire time.

Since the film’s release, it’s shot up to No 1 on Netflix. Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, it marks their company’s first fiction film.

In a previous interview with Vanity Fair, Esmail revealed that while preparing the book for the screen, the former US president “scared” him with extensive script notes.

“In the original drafts of the script, I definitely pushed things a lot farther than they were in the film, and President Obama, having the experience he does have, was able to ground me a little bit on how things might unfold in reality,” the Mr Robot creator explained.

“I am writing what I think is fiction, for the most part, I’m trying to keep it as true to life as possible, but I’m exaggerating and dramatising. And to hear an ex-president say you’re off by a few details… I thought I was off by a lot! The fact that he said that scared the f*** out of me.”

Leave the World Behind is out on Netflix.