Matthew López knows better than most that adapting a fan-favorite novel can be a dangerous game. Readers who live and breathe an author’s words are a tough crowd, especially toward filmmakers looking to put their personal touch on a beloved story.
But López, who won a Tony for “The Inheritance,” defied the odds 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 directorial debut with the movie, already greenlit for a sequel, co-written with McQuiston.
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López could have taken a victory lap and used the success of the first “Red, White & Royal Blue” movie to circle back to his original projects. Instead, he eyed another adaptation that carries even higher expectations — Madeline Miller’s “The Song of Achilles.” The bestselling book retells the story of the Trojan War through the perspective of Patroclus and his romantic relationship with the mythological hero, Achilles.
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“There were weeks of researching the Trojan War,” he tells Variety. “I was rereading ‘The Iliad.’ I was conferring with Stephen Fry, who is a knowledgeable historian in his own right and has written a lot about the Trojan War. I wanted to take ‘A Song of Achilles,’ and I wanted to make it huge. I wanted to do a multi-season arc.”
He was most attracted to the questions that arise from seeing a famous story through a queer lens. “What Madeline has done so brilliantly in her book is it causes us to think about how much queer erasure has gone on in our history — recent and ancient,” he says.
But the series didn’t happen. López never got the full story of why it all fell apart, but he holds no ill will.
“If I am Madeline Miller and I have written a book as beloved as that, I would probably want to be pretty circumspect about what I did with it because you generally only get to do it once,” he reasons.
López didn’t get far into development, but he was adamant that Miller’s story is too sweeping to be anything but episodic. It is 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 instinct told me that ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’ shouldn’t be longer than two hours,” he says. “But when I looked at ‘Achilles,’ I was like, ‘Give me 40 hours of this.’”
Since the debut of “Red, White & Royal Blue,” “The Song of Achilles” has constantly been brought up among fans, some of whom have fancast Galitzine and Perez in the roles of Patroclus and Achilles.
“I’ll be honest with you, I think that is the worst idea,” López says, laughing. “Please add that I say that with a smile because I do. But Nick and Taylor are already young men. ‘The Song of Achilles’ is about boys who are becoming young men. It’s the crucible of that war that turns them into adults, and that’s what is so exciting about the long-form journey of that.”
López hasn’t given up on his Achillean epic. Rather, he acknowledges that getting excited about something is part of the perilous process of being a creator. “You have to allow yourself to fall in love with the things that 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 knew how to approach ‘Achilles’ was to start making the show in my head.”