America was living under a cloud of fear created by the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthyism, which brought political repression, blacklists and censorship of literature and art. “Fahrenheit 451” was written in the early 1950s, not long after Nazis burned books and, eventually, human beings. (In the novel, she dies early on.) With Bradbury as my guide, and a vow to stay true to his ideas, I began working on the script. More important, Bradbury himself had reimagined “Fahrenheit 451,” first as a stage play and then as a musical, changing many elements, including letting Montag’s neighbor Clarisse McClellan live. I knew Bradbury had supported François Truffaut’s 1966 film adaptation. Altering a work so brilliant and beloved always upsets some fans.
I had never adapted a book, let alone one so important. He feared a future in which those things would be endangered, and now that future was here: The internet and new social-media platforms - and their potential threat to serious thought - would be at the heart of my adaptation. For Bradbury, books were repositories of knowledge and ideas. But the more I thought about it, the more relevant the novel seemed. If he felt this way, what would teenagers think? Bradbury’s novel is a classic taught in high schools across America. I can read anything on my tablet, from the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ to Jo Nesbo, and I can read them in bed, on a plane or next to the ocean, because it’s all in the cloud, safe from your firemen’s torches.” I asked an 82-year-old friend for advice. When I set out to adapt the novel early in 2016, I was faced with a big question: Do people still care about physical books? The protagonist, a fireman named Guy Montag, begins to doubt his actions and turns against his mentor, Captain Beatty. In my parents’ household, Hafez’s book of Persian poetry, “The Divan,” was revered like a religious text.īut now I was making a film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s seminal novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” which presents a future America where books are outlawed and firemen burn them.
Even setting a teacup on a book was considered a sin.
I was taught at a very young age to read and respect books. We designed powerful, kerosene-spitting flamethrowers and torched books - en masse. There will be no such disclaimer at the end of my new film, because we burned a lot of books. No books were harmed in the making of this motion picture.
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