“You Should Have Left” is the second collaboration between Kevin Bacon and director David Koepp. Previously, the two of them worked together on the 1999 horror film “Stir of Echoes,” which is based on a novel by author Richard Matheson.
Koepp told Daily Dead that the idea for “You Should Have Left” dates back to him and Bacon wanting to make a horror film about marriage, similar in tone to “Rosemary’s Baby.” It was Bacon who approached Koepp with the 2016 German novella “You Should Have Left” by author Daniel Kehlmann, proposing that they shape their idea into a literary adaptation. “My initial response, of course, was, ‘I don’t want your stupid book. I want to tell my story,'” Koepp said. After he read the novella, however, he acquiesced.
The notion that the protagonist — unnamed in its source material — tells his past self that he should have left comes directly from Kehlmann’s book, though the manners of communication in the two works differ. While initially, the future version of Kehlmann’s narrator leaves a note in a notebook, later on, he communicates the book’s title through a baby monitor rather than writing a second note. Otherwise, this aspect of the book translates directly into Koepp’s filmed adaptation.
