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Great Adaptations: A Winning Script Doesn’t Have to be Totally Original
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“Children of Men really puts you inside a world gone mad, allowing you to feel it with your gut and your senses rather than having it explained or intellectualized. Conversely, the book has more time to explore human dynamics—for example, Theo’s relationship to the character of Julian—that didn’t survive in the film. The bottom line? Film is about choices. It’s a brutal medium and the more hard choices that are made, the better the movie.” Fergus recommends that writers “let go of the specifics that don’t translate and invent ones that do. As long as every element is emotionally right, it doesn’t need to literally reflect the source material.”
Shares novelist-screenwriter J.P. Smith, “When a book is good—when it’s literature more than just another novel—a film can never really improve upon it because a book, to some degree, is about the language. For me, the finest adaptor of literary novels is Harold Pinter. His film of Robin Maugham’s The Servant is far superior to the short novel on which it’s based; his script of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between is the equal to this very fine novel; his solution to adapting John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman is ingenious; and his adaptation of Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu is a model of literary adaptation—a novel that, on the surface, would defy any and all transference to another medium.”
Smith’s quest in adapting his own first novel, The Man from Marseille, was not to be literally faithful to the book, but to be faithful to the poetry of the story. “Once I understood that—and it took many months—the process was liberating,” he says. Smith’s advice to fellow screenwriters is to read the work they’re adapting three times. “First, simply to enjoy the book itself and understand what entranced enough people to bring it to print. Second, to deconstruct the book, to understand what it’s truly about and to remain faithful to that throughout the process. Third, to begin to see what you absolutely must keep for the film version and what must be jettisoned in terms of the characters and their conflicts.”
Though David Kahane’s first optioned adaptation fell just short of a greenlight, the lessons he learned from it were invaluable. “It’s a mistake to view the screenplay as an abbreviated version of the literary work, even though this is what’s expected by most authors and audiences,” says Kahane. “It’s why I think short stories usually make better film adaptations than novels. The real task is to identify the essence of the story and the key attributes of the best characters and build on that.” Working with the book’s author also honed Kahane’s interpretation and persuasion skills in convincing the writer to accept the cinematic modifications he proposed. “There were things I could have done to make it more interesting for the screen but wasn’t brave enough to.”
For Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, co-writers of Brokeback Mountain, the most significant test in penning their adaptation was acknowledging that the short story and the film were two distinctly separate entities. “Both are powerful in their own right and each stands alone,” notes Ossana. “Annie Proulx’s prose is both evocative and powerful and enables the reader to imagine the men, the landscape and the emotions. The film does the same except through visual images. Our goal was to expand the material so that it remained true to the characters, landscape and essence of the original storyline.
I felt strongly that the experience of watching the film needed to evoke the same feelings in the viewer as reading the short story did in the reader. The film version of Brokeback Mountain wasn’t necessarily ‘better’ than the short story, it was simply different. It fleshed out the domestic lives of both men and the ‘ripple effect’ of Ennis and Jack’s relationship on the people in their lives, the circumstances of their extended families, their relationships with women, the women themselves and their children.”
Planning to tackle an adaptation yourself? Ossana’s advice is golden: “Find material that triggers your emotions and stimulates your imagination. Then sit down and write a first draft. Then be relentless. Don’t lose faith. Good work will always find its way.”
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This story was published in the Guide to Making Movies 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Great Adaptations/A Winning Script Doesn't Have to be Totally Original
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