Matthew López knows better than anyone that adapting a fan-favorite novel into a film can be a dangerous game. Readers who live and breathe an author’s words are a tricky group, especially when it comes to filmmakers who want to put their personal spin on a beloved story.
But López, who won a Tony for “The Inheritance,” defied expectations last fall with Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s “Red, White & Royal Blue,” a love story of geopolitical proportions between Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the bisexual son of the President of the United States (Uma Thurman) and Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the gay grandson of the British monarch (Stephen Fry). López made his feature debut with the film, which has already greenlit a sequel, co-written with McQuiston.
López could have taken a victory lap and used the success of the first “Red, White & Royal Blue” film to return to his original projects. Instead, he looked to another adaptation that carries even higher expectations: Madeline Miller’s “The Song of Achilles.” The bestselling book retells the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Patroclus and his romantic relationship with the mythological hero Achilles.
“The Trojan War was being investigated for weeks,” he tells Variety. ‘I was rereading ‘The Iliad’. I was consulting with Stephen Fry, a knowledgeable historian who has written extensively about the Trojan War. I wanted to take “A Song of Achilles,” and I wanted to make it big. I wanted to create a multi-season arc.
He was most drawn to the questions that arise when you look at a famous story through a strange lens. “What Madeline has done so brilliantly in her book is that it makes us think about how much strange erasure has taken place in our history – both recent and ancient,” he says.
But the series did not materialize. López never got the full story of why it all fell apart, but he harbors no ill will.
“If I’m Madeline Miller and I wrote such a beloved book, I’d probably want to be pretty circumspect about what I did with it, because you can usually only do it once,” he reasons.
López didn’t get far into development, but he was convinced that Miller’s story is too sweeping to be anything but episodic. It’s the same question he faced with “Red, White & Royal Blue,” which many fans said should be a limited series to give the book room to breathe.
“My instincts told me that ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’ shouldn’t be longer than two hours,” he says. “But when I watched ‘Achilles,’ I thought, ‘Give me 40 hours of this.’”
Since the debut of ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’, ‘The Song of Achilles’ has been continually brought up among fans, some of whom have fancast Galitzine and Perez in the roles of Patroclus and Achilles.
“I’ll be honest, I think that’s the worst idea,” López says, laughing. “Please add that I say that with a smile, because that’s what I do. But Nick and Taylor are already young men. ‘The Song of Achilles’ is about boys becoming young men. It’s the crucible of that war that makes them adults, and that’s what’s so exciting about the long journey of that.”
López has not yet given up on his Achillean epic. Instead, he recognizes that getting excited about something is part of the dangerous process of being a creator. “You have to allow yourself to fall in love with the things you won’t actually do,” he says. “It’s the only way to really convince other people to give you the money to do them. The only way I could approach ‘Achilles’ was to start creating the show in my head.”
