![]() In my analysis, I suggest that readers’ attribution of mental-states to the vampires in Matheson’s novel is strategically limited through a number of choices in their linguistic construal. I draw upon empirical research into ‘mind attribution’ in social psychology, and apply Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), and its notion of ‘construal’, as a framework for the application of such findings to narrative. In this article, I explore the application of such research to the minds constructed for the vampire characters in Richard Matheson’s 1954 science fiction/horror novel I Am Legend. In other words, says Smith, ”we took a big hint from Tom Hanks in Cast Away.For Palmer (2004, 2010), and other proponents of a cognitive narratology, research into real-world minds in the cognitive sciences provides insights into readers’ experiences of fictional minds. We desperately had to get in there and figure out how to make it riveting.” That took work: improvising scenes, reintroducing elements from Protosevich’s earlier script (the scribe shares credit with Goldsman on the finished film), meeting with experts on infectious diseases and solitary confinement, and exploring earlier films in which an isolated soul struggles to survive. ”It’s a $100 million-plus movie where the lead doesn’t talk for the first hour,” says Smith. The actor dug it enough to come back, even if he felt the writing wasn’t quite there yet. ![]() By Christmas 2005, he had a script and sent it to Smith, for whom he had co-written I, Robot. Goldsman, a Big Apple native, felt the new setting lent it some timely resonance and differentiated it from its predecessors. Very quickly, the duo hit upon a big idea: relocating the tale from Los Angeles to New York. Confident in Goldsman and eager to stay in business with Lawrence, Warner Bros.
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