I can't count the number of times I've gone to see a film adaptation of a book I've read only to be disappointed by the result. It's lead to my policy of almost always seeing a movie before I read its source material, simply because I know I'll probably be more impressed with the latter. But this seemingly inevitable degradation in the transition from paperback to film stock is because writing a novel and writing a movie are two very different processes.
There are the obvious differences in method between presenting a story in prose and presenting it visually on film. Authors make use of grand descriptive metaphors and similes to convey feelings and ideas like filmmakers use lingering shots and meticulously crafted visual atmospheres. But beyond the differences in how authors and filmmakers tell their stories, the stories themselves must be different.
Writing a novel is an exercise in complete freedom. A novel can go anywhere, do anything and easily span any distances in time or space. It is usually more a collection of short connected stories arranged in chapters, miniature climaxes happening continuously over the course of the larger story to keep the reader interested, rather than the singular narrative arc that structures most movies.
In this way, movies have far more in common with short stories than they do with novels. A bildungsroman, or coming of age, novel like "Jane Eyre" or "David Copperfield" often encapsulates a character's entire life, from childhood through adulthood, depicting a life-long transition from adolescence to maturity. Coming of age movies, perhaps best associated with the 80's films of John Hughes, on the other hand, tend to focus on one fleeting moment in a character's life, as he or she stands on the precipice of transformation.
Indeed, many prominent movies have been adapted from little-known short stories. The Tom Cruise sci-fi blockbuster "Minority Report" was adapted from a Philip K. Dick short story of the same name. "Memento" originated as a short story written by director Chris Nolan's brother Jonathan. Even iconic films like "Brokeback Mountain" and Hitchcock's "Rear Window" have origins as short fiction. Perhaps the chief benefit of adapting from short stories is the lack of burden placed on the screenwriter. There is no mountain of content nagging to be included. Instead the writer has much more freedom to reinvent for the screen.
This is why adapting full-length novels for the screen can be so difficult-and why the film versions so often go awry. Especially with written stories that are already popular before being adapted, there is an innate pressure from the property's existing fan base to maintain fidelity to the original. With the long, complex stories that novels typically contain, this burden to include every detail, and with complete accuracy can often end up degrading the film incarnation.
Sometimes these films can end up feeling like snapshots of a larger story-such as the film adaptation of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," the longest entry of the book series, which was adapted into the shortest installment of the film series. While entertaining for fans already familiar with the deeper story of the literary original, it can leave newcomers in the dust by sacrificing "completeness" of the story for brief spurts of fidelity to the source material. Essentially, these filmmakers are forfeiting the independence of their films, the ability to stand alone as a self-contained work of art, in favor of serving simply as one part of a larger canon.
Over the course of my Thanksgiving break, I became engrossed in James Sallis's 2005 novel "Drive"-the source material for the phenomenal 2011 film of the same name that won Nicolas Winding Refn the Best Director award at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Perhaps the most intriguing facet of the novel was just how different it was from the film. The novel is an enthralling work of sunshine neo-noir in its own right, but a different beast entirely. In the end, it felt like screenwriter Hossein Amini read Sallis's novel, absorbed it and understood it, but then set it aside in favor of writing his own story for the screen to convey the spirit of Sallis's novel and his nameless antihero, rather than trying to transcribe Sallis's literal story plot-point-by-plot-point. And the film version of "Drive" is incalculably better because of it. In fact, I would argue that Refn and Amini's "Drive" is one of the rare cases of a film standing as a better final product than its source material-in league with the likes of "High Fidelity" and "Up in the Air".
What these three film adaptations hold in common are scripts unabashedly willing to reinvent the original. "Up in the Air" is almost unrecognizable from the novel on which it was based. Writer/Director Jason Reitman (Juno) extracted the deftly crafted main character (played by George Clooney in the film) from the book and created new sets of circumstances for him as well as new companions entirely. One of these was the character Anna Kendrick played in the film version, garnering her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, which was entirely an invention by Reitman.
Likewise, when John Cusack and his collaborators went about writing their script for a cinematic incarnation of Nick Hornby's novel "High Fidelity," they made the risky decision to move the story from its iconic North London setting to Chicago, heavily Americanizing it in the process. Cusack also fundamentally altered the structure and chronology of the story, making it work in a two-hour runtime-no small feat given the novel's quirky faux-autobiographical nature. But Cusack was able to keep the spirit of Hornby's unique story alive by continuously breaking the fourth wall, producing the same confessional nature of Hornby's literary original through cinematic avenues.
While it may pain fans of the original, the reality is that any film adaptation will be better served if it is given freedom to depart from the original. The art forms of the novel and the movie are so different-deceptively so-that most stories cannot function at the highest level in both forms without drastic reformation. It may feel sacrilegious to some, but if we want more extraordinary movies like "Drive" we need to give filmmakers room to truly adapt.
Are you Harry Potter and Twilight-novel fans outraged? Wholeheartedly agree? Let David know at dcottrell@wisc.edu.
