Geddy Lee has named the Rush album that he would love to see adapted into a screenplay, and the vocalist/bassist says that the group's late drummer Neil Peart had already done some work on trying to make the idea a reality.
As part of a new interview with Vulture to promote his newly-published memoir My Effin’ Life, Lee is asked to nominate a Rush song 'that should be adapted into a screenplay'
"There are a couple that could make very different types of films if someone wanted to take them on," Lee says in response. "2112 is obvious as a sci-fi story of 'the individual against the collective.' I think the setting of it would lend itself to visual interpretation. Whether that’s been done too much, I don’t know. You’ve got generations of Star Wars films. It’s not new territory, but there’s something in that story that would translate into the genre."
Rush's frontman then goes on to offer an alternate suggestion, choosing an album, rather than a specific song, for consideration.
"More importantly and more originally, I’d love an interpretation of the entirety of Clockwork Angels," he says. "It’s based on a classic story of a naïve and innocent person going out into the world, and running away to try to find the place to make his dreams come true. He goes through all those various phases of his life where he’s duped, where he recovers from that, where he falls in love, where he loses his love, and then it all adds up to the fullness of his life. That really would lend itself to a fantasy story, but not necessarily a sci-fi fantasy story. When you look at what’s been done with shows like The Last of Us or Game of Thrones, you can take cinema anywhere now. Yet the story at the heart of Clockwork Angels is a full circle of life."
"I’ve received ideas for 2112 on and off for many years, but nothing has ever really made us want to go down that road," he adds. "I know Neil [Peart] always wanted to bring the Clockwork Angels story to the screen in some way or another. It was a big deal for him, and he had done some work in the hopes he could make something like that happen. Maybe one day."
Speaking to Prog magazine in 2012 when Clockwork Angels was released, Lee referenced the fact that Neil Peart felt that there was scope to extend the story beyond two sides of a vinyl record.
"There’s so much Neil wants to say about the story and not all of that is appropriate on a rock album," he stated. "There were times when we would say, 'Look, we know that this aspect of it is really important to you but it’s going to bog the record down.' The frustration of wanting to say much more but given the limitations of lyrics and the constraints of a rock album led him to explore other ways to tell the story. And it makes a lot of sense and inspired him from a creative point of view."
My Effin’ Life by Geddy Lee is out now, on Harper.
