Adapting Emperor's Soul

[DiePie]

     Back when Brandon Sanderson was still shopping around for big-budget Hollywood adaptations of the Cosmere, I was one of the people who thought that the Emperor's Soul would be a good place to start. Probably because I heard that it had been picked up, and then forgot that it had been picked up, but still had the excitement from those times. Anyways, more recently there was a Mistborn movie in the works instead, because Hollywood goes big or goes home (if I'm remembering my WoBs right), and when Brandon announced that that was shot down, I got to thinking: How difficult would it be to crowdfund a movie? He raised over 50 million for 4 books and some goodie boxes (not that I'm deriding those those things, the average Sanderson fan [including me] is probably more likely to buy that than help crowdfund a movie), and 50 mil is probably enough for a movie of the scope of The Emperor's Soul. I know it's not, but let me dream.

 

     Anyways, I got inspired to write out how I  would adapt Emperor's Soul. I wrote like 3000 words going line-by-line through the first few chapters, never got around to making sure it saved properly (thanks OneDrive), and lost it all when my computer restarted. I had some fun ideas, like a scene that plays out while the credits roll on the left side of the screen. It's Frava's office, a chair in the foreground, then her desk (facing the camera), and behind it the painting that Shai stole initially. Shai opens a door on the left, cuts the painting, makes a crude mark on the now-exposed wall behind the painting, and leaves through a window on the right as you hear muffled voices through the door. Frava then walks in, arguing about Shai's escape/the new emperor being more difficult to manipulate. Hoid walks in behind her, and Frava is so focused on arguing with him that she doesn't notice the painting until after she sits down at her desk, her sitting form dominated by the destroyed painting behind her. Hoid then does something (I have a few ideas on that point) to alert Frava to the painting, where she then turns around, sees that it's destroyed, and yells in frustration. I'm sure Brandon either has a curse, or would love to create one, that the rulers of the Rose empire use.

 

     But as much as I love that scene, that's not the reason I'm writing this post. The biggest problem with adapting the emperor's soul is that Shai sees through the political plots immediately, and her attempts to stay one step ahead of them is what gives tension to the book. In order for the audience to understand Frava's machinations, I decided to make Hoid a character trying to help Shai escape (mainly by being someone to bounce ideas off). He would pop into her room disguised as a Grand, then leave through the window as Frava entered, prompting Shai to look at the window more closely afterwards, where the scene would end with a close-up of the broken stained-glass in the window frame. Or he would whisper to her through the floorboards by her bed (or just using a soul-stamp of his own so they can sit on the top of a shelf in that room), helping foreshadow to the watcher Shai's trap, using the weakened bed falling into the storage-room underneath. To introduce Hoid, I included the cut (but technically still canonical) scene where he meets Shai in the prison, but had her correct him on the number of rocks used in the prison cell (I think it's more realistic that she would know, and it also helps build her up as being extremely competent in her field of study). Hoid has changed over the course of the cosmere from being more... eldritch to whimsical. He still has that all-knowing, "I will do whatever it takes", edge to him, but it's better hidden by a man whom time has only made stranger. In that chapter his character traits are  conveyed in this scene by him giving Shai all the information she uses to bluff her way out of the next scene, the way he lords over her in her prison cell, and a "your lifetime is nothing to me" look. I didn't like the first two elements, since (and I think it's more the way they were written than anything else) they make Shai seem kind of helpless compared to him. So now it rests on the look to convey that this being is the next best thing to a god (ignoring Aethers), but I feel that you'd need a really good actor/director to convince the audience of that with a short look.

 

     So I finally get to the point of my post: I had an idea to help get the idea across. When Hoid is looking at Shai, the camera starts pointed directly at Hoid's face. It zooms in to one of his eyes, and when only his pupil is in frame, a bright dot (reflected from a flame, perhaps) resolves into a star. This star explodes into a supernova, and the camera races out until the supernova is in the background, and a planet (Yolen, with all the correct geography), orbiting the star moves in front of the camera, before being backlit by the supernova and thrown into darkness. The camera continues to back up, but when the supernova takes the entire frame (besides the planet), it then resolves into Hoid's iris, the backlit planet his pupil, the glint gone. I think this accomplishes a few things: First of all, it conveys to the watcher that Hoid is powerful by associating him with that sort of power. Second, it is an allusion to his backstory with the shattering. Third of all: It matches previous descriptions of Yolish Lightweaving, tricks of perception to turn otherwise mundane shapes into artistic pieces. Fourth: It should be pretty easy to do on a budget.

 

      I think that the Emperor's Soul is the best-written book released under the name Brandon Sanderson, and I didn't like his idea of expanding it to include more locations/characters. As is, I think the Emperor's Soul has a lot of potential to become a very unique movie, with characters that are already written to be sympathetic/disdainful where the story needs them to be. I think expanding the story any more than necessary to translate thoughtful reactions to the big screen to be like starting off a Wheel of Time adaptation with anything but the camera following the path of the wind as it blew over the land. Also if you read all that, thank you. I didn't mean for it to be so long but there's so much to say.