Article : difficulties in going from novels to bigscreen

[jelerak]

Interesting article...and includes some commentary from David Benioff, who is one of the parties involved with HBO and ASOAF project.

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080112/ap_on_en_mo/film_page_to_screen

By CHRISTY LEMIRE, AP Movie Writer
Sat Jan 12, 3:42 PM ET


LOS ANGELES - David Benioff was sitting on a plane, having a perfectly pleasant conversation with an elderly passenger about his job as a screenwriter, when he mentioned that he was working on an adaptation of "The Kite Runner."


"She grabbed my arm and said, `That's my favorite novel. Don't change a word!'"

Based on the international best-seller about a man who returns to Afghanistan to right a childhood wrong, "The Kite Runner" is one of an inordinately large number of films in this year's awards race that come from books.

Screenwriters like Benioff are acutely aware of the inevitable comparisons between book and movie, and face the daunting challenge of telling a cinematic story that will resonate with audiences while remaining somewhat true to the source material.

Sure, every year there are several book-club favorites that turn up at the multiplex. Perusing the list of Academy Award best-picture winners can feel like a trip to Barnes & Noble, from "Gone With the Wind" and "The Godfather" to "The Silence of the Lambs" and "The English Patient."

But during this tumultuous, strike-hobbled awards season, at least a dozen movies with literary roots have real shots at winning the biggest prizes. Some of those novels, like Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner," are beloved and readers feel proprietary about them. Others, like Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," seemed impossible to adapt because they were too complicated, too internal.

The adaptations themselves range from the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men," which maintained much of Cormac McCarthy's rich Texas vernacular, to Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," in which the writer-director merely used Upton Sinclair's "Oil!" as a leaping-off point. Still others come from novellas ("Lust, Caution"), graphic novels ("Persepolis") or are based on non-fiction works ("Charlie Wilson's War," "Into the Wild," "A Mighty Heart").

Benioff was lucky in that he'd read "The Kite Runner" before he got the job, and he'd started his screenplay before the book became a huge hit. Halfway through his first draft, though, he began to feel the pressure.

"It's an amazingly emotional story. People become attached to those characters and they really long for redemption for Amir, for him to make up for what he has done, to heal those wounds," he said.

As a novelist himself, having written "25th Hour" and adapted the screenplay for director Spike Lee, Benioff said he "felt an extra layer of pressure — I didn't want to let Khaled down. I liked him a lot and respected him a lot and he was a real ally. ... When it's your own book, you want the movie to be good but there's less pressure."

Veteran Ronald Harwood already has an Oscar for adapting 2002's "The Pianist," but still found himself pacing his Paris flat for weeks, trying to figure a way into "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." The late author, Bauby, was the editor of French Elle who suffered a paralyzing stroke at 43 and used his left eyelid to blink out what he wanted to say, letter by letter. Harwood tried to blink the alphabet to get into Bauby's head and it drove him mad.

Finally, it occurred to him to begin from Bauby's woozy, obscured perspective in the hospital room.

"That was my breakthrough," said Harwood, whose script is up for a Golden Globe and who has a new book of his own on the subject, "Ronald Harwood's Adaptations: From Other Works Into Films." "I thought, `This is the story I could tell — the story of his illness.' And the camera did the blinking — that was my idea, because it did two things: It gives the audience the sense of what it's like to have locked-in syndrome, and the second thing it did was that they didn't have to look at him for two hours, which would have been dreadful."

Christopher Hampton read "Atonement," a sweeping drama about a young girl's damaging lie, while on vacation and found it so obviously cinematic, he couldn't wait to dash home, pick up the phone and call someone about writing the script. The movie has a leading seven Globe nominations, including best screenplay.

"I didn't know it would turn out to be far harder than I thought it was going to be," said Hampton, who won an Oscar for 1988's "Dangerous Liaisons." "It was a long, long process with many, many drafts."

Adapting "Atonement" was daunting because it's about a writer and much of it takes place within the characters' interiors. Hampton initially had written in voiceover and a framing device — none of which exists in the finished version, which is closer to the book's structure.

"The most effective way is the simplest," he found. "Show it from the young girl's perspective, then loop back and show what really happened. It's so simple. I can't tell you how many different ways we approached it."

It helped to have a rapport with author McEwan, who chose Hampton himself and got an executive-producer credit.

"The relationship between the adapter and the adaptee, if there is such a word, is very delicate, because you're taking his child and educating it and changing it in your own way," Hampton said. "Fortunately, Ian is very experienced in the sense that he's had a lot of his books turned into movies and even done one or two himself. So he knows what the score is."

McEwan said he realizes the process of adaptation is "a kind of demolition job."

"You've got to boil down 130,000 words to a screenplay containing 20,000 words," the author said in the "Atonement" production notes.

Aaron Stockard, meanwhile, was terrified to meet author Dennis Lehane while adapting "Gone Baby Gone," his first produced screenplay, with director and longtime friend Ben Affleck. The crime drama comes from one of Lehane's books about a pair of private eyes in a rough part of Boston, and has made an awards front-runner of supporting actress Amy Ryan as a junkie mom.

"When he came on set for the first few times I intentionally avoided him. I felt like (he must have thought), `What in the world is this kid doing taking this story I wrote, with characters I've written six books about, and making these changes?'" Stockard said of Lehane, who also wrote "Mystic River." "But I kind of kept reminding myself, this needs to stand on its own. And I can't do it to please him and I can't do it to please fans of the book."

In determining what to cut and what to keep, "Lust, Caution" co-writer James Schamus says the key is to remember always that you're making a movie. Based on a short story about passion and betrayal by revered Chinese writer Eileen Chang, the film is a Globe nominee in the foreign language category.

"You have to keep that in mind — not that you are in some way responsible to or beholden to the underlying work," said Schamus, the Focus Features chief who's also adapted "The Ice Storm," "Ride With the Devil" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for his longtime friend, director Ang Lee. "The primary task is to make sure the movie is good, not to make sure you're faithful to any part of the underlying work. That doesn't mean you're disrespectful — far from it."

Anderson only used about the first 100 pages of "Oil!" for "There Will Be Blood," the story of a volatile oilman which has Globe nominations for best picture and actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Still, that was a huge departure for the maker of the original ensemble pieces "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia."

"The benefits of the adaptation was that it helped me do things that my natural instincts wouldn't lead me to do," Anderson said in a recent Associated Press story, acknowledging his inclination to "spin off the rails a bit more."

"It was like collaborating with somebody," he added.

John Orloff did have a collaborator in Mariane Pearl while adapting her memoir "A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl," about the murder of her journalist husband. (Angelina Jolie is up for a Globe for her starring performance; Orloff's script has earned him a Spirit Award nomination.) But he also went beyond her book to interview the people who investigated Pearl's death and present a fuller picture.

"I talked to Mariane constantly. It was both intimidating and really helpful," Orloff said. "Mariane, in person, is this incredibly open, giving partner in all this who wanted nothing more than having her story be told in the most accurate, dramatic way possible. That said, as a writer, I had this incredible — and I think everyone who had anything to do with the film — had this incredible onus and responsibility to get it right, and to make her feel we got it right.

"One reason I fell in love with `A Mighty Heart' was because I didn't have to make stuff up," he added. "I didn't have to make changes. I didn't have to — quote unquote — be inspired by a true story."

[Zahir]

I've actually adapted a novel to (unproduced) screenplay format and can tell you the process is an odd one. What I did was actually go through the book, highlighting the scenes I thought important. I wrote an outline, streamlining and combining elements, and making one huge change--I began the story halfway in, revealing the backstory as some of the characters themselves learned it. I even managed to avoid flashbacks. <g> Along the way, my adaptation managed to include all kinds of scenes that no previous version ever had. How many of you even realize there was a lesbian love story in The Count of Monte Cristo, eh? Well, there is. It involves Danglars' daughter.

But to me, adaptation is fascinating. I've had many an argument/debate (usually online) about the quality of various adaptations. LOTR is a case in point, not because I think it flawless but because it seems to me many criticisms of it aren't terribly valid.

If you want to see an example of just how bad an adaptation can be, take a gander at the first sound version of Moby Dick with John Barrymore. Four words: Ahab Gets The Girl.

'Nuff said.

On the other hand, The Hunt for Red October was such a good film that I went out and bought the novel. I so very much want my money--and more, those moments from my life--back! What a wretched piece of prose! They killed some trees for that? Which just goes to show that the movie can be as good or even better than the book.

[Menolly]

Oh Zahir...

Now you really got me wanting your own take on adaptations of the different HP novels. Please, if you have the time, come start a thread regarding them in the JKR forum?

Or, post your thoughts in each movie's thread? Please?

[Zahir]

Yeah, okay. <g>

[onewyteduck]

On the other hand, The Hunt for Red October was such a good film that I went out and bought the novel. I so very much want my money--and more, those moments from my life--back! What a wretched piece of prose! They killed some trees for that? Which just goes to show that the movie can be as good or even better than the book.

I had read the book prior to seeing the movie, found myself skimming through an awful lot of it. I liked the movie much better also!

[lucimay]

the difficulties of adapting a novel to the screen are enormous.
for one, the novel is a much longer format for telling a story than
120 minutes of screen time.

novella's lend themselves to this process much better.
as do graphic novels.

Road to Perdition comes to mind, Sin City, and several others.

Redford, who has never been one of my favorite actors, has
an excellent track record as a director who understands the
process of adapting novel to screen.
he's done several that were, in my opinion, some of the best
adaptations ever,
judith guest's Ordinary People (screenwriter Alvin Sargent)
john nichols' Milagro Beanfield War (nichols worked on the screenplay
along with screenwriter david s ward)
and my favorite of redford's adaptations,
Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It (a novella)
with screenwriter richard friedenberg.

[matrixman]

"You have to keep that in mind — not that you are in some way responsible to or beholden to the underlying work," said Schamus, the Focus Features chief who's also adapted "The Ice Storm," "Ride With the Devil" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for his longtime friend, director Ang Lee. "The primary task is to make sure the movie is good, not to make sure you're faithful to any part of the underlying work. That doesn't mean you're disrespectful — far from it."

Mr. Schamus sums up my own attitude. I don't care how faithful an adaptation is to the source material if it ends up being a crap movie. It has to stand on its own.

I'm even prepared to say that people should be able to understand and enjoy a Covenant film without ever having read a single word of the books, if the film does its job in telling the story in a way that only film can.

[Loredoctor]

I was horrified that Cruise and Spielberg were working on War of the Worlds. When I heard about some of the changes, I almost refused to see it. I'm glad that I did, because it captures the novel better than the 50s movie ever did.

That's the issue: if the theme and message remain unchanged, then I'm okay with it.

[aliantha]

It does make me sad if favorite characters or scenes are left out of the movie. But yeah, a movie just doesn't have enough space to tell everything a novel tells. Stuff has to be left out. I agree with Lore (if the theme and message are the same, I'm generally okay with it) and with MM (whatever I thought of the book, if it's a crap movie, I'm not going to waste my time seeing it).

Re what Luci said: I would even go so far as to say that short stories work best on the screen, better even than novellas (think "Brokeback Mountain"). Kinda gives you an idea of how much actual story content is in your average movie, doesn't it?

[matrixman]

Ah, but we shouldn't forget that "a picture is worth a thousand words" - at least potentially. A movie's visuals tell the story as much as the actual dialog does, if not more so. If the "actual story content" of a movie seems scant, I might argue that perhaps it is simply because a movie - at its best - is able to cut through verbiage and get to the heart of the matter, much as that sentiment may horrify the writer in all of us.

I'm not saying I think writing doesn't matter in a movie, as I detest badly written scripts as much as anyone. When I think of my most favorite films, yes, I always think of the impact of the visuals first, but they're (nearly) always backed up by an intelligent screenplay.

Oh, and I agree with Lore too. As long as the adaptation maintains the "spirit" of the source material, I'm okay with it as well.

[Cagliostro]

I've done a bit of adapting as well into screenplay, but the material was Bored of the Rings, and I wanted to adapt it from satire from 1969 to today, also with the movies to satirize as well. I never finished the project, as I think the time for it is done.

[Zahir]

On another board, there is a whole section that sometimes seems like it should be named How Peter Jackson Screwed Up. I am amazed at the sometimes-petty complaints about adaptations of beloved books. Here are just a few of the complaints thar regularly come up:

* 2,000+ year old elf being able to sneak up on Aragorn
* Legolas blonde hair
* Aragorn's reluctance to take the crown
* Gandalf and Saruman fighting
* Frodo not out-riding the Nazgul.
* The Balrog had wings (oy!)
* Elves at Helm's Deep

On the other hand, I'll admit to some criticisms myself:

* Too much emphasis on action at the sacrifice of character-driven story (espeically in ROTK)
* The Ents changing their minds was just too awkward for words
* The extra bits with the Dead in the EE of ROTK were overblown, pointless and almost Monty Python-esque.
* Anachronisms that bothered me personally, like the "dwarf tossing" lines and the Gimli mentioning a "nervous system."

But then, tis a tricky thing to adapt any novel, especially a very popular one (and yeah, short stories and novellas are easier).

Here is a list of my fave film adaptations, both true-to-the-source and very much affecting as films:

The Haunting (the original B&W version with Julie Harris)
Moby Dick (the Gregory Peck/John Huston/Ray Bradbury version from the 1950s)
The Silence of the Lambs
Perfume (although, not having read the book, I may be way off base here)

There are almost certainly others I'm forgetting to mention.

[aliantha]

Legolas's blond hair was one of the best things about LOTR, IMHO. (I know he was the teenybopper heartthrob of the trilogy, but he *was* darn cute. Viggo Mortensen had it goin' on, but he was a little too, um, unkempt.)

(Does anybody even say "teenybopper" any more? )

I do agree with you that Jackson seriously relied on action to drive the LOTR movies. We saw all three at midnight shows. During the last one, I admit, I dozed off during the prep for the huge battle with the orcs. At one point I woke up, watched the screen for about 30 seconds, said to myself, "Yeah, yeah, the bad guys are still ugly," and shut my eyes again.

Hey MM, getting back to "a picture is worth" etc. -- my only quibble is that a movie can be gorgeous but still crappy (see "Barry Lyndon" -- no wait, don't bother. I *still* can't believe I paid to see that thing).

[Menolly]

Legolas's blond hair was one of the best things about LOTR, IMHO. (I know he was the teenybopper heartthrob of the trilogy, but he *was* darn cute. Viggo Mortensen had it goin' on, but he was a little too, um, unkempt.)

...hear, hear...

I am not an Orlando Bloom fan. In spite of what dAN may tell you.
But Legolas as portrayed in the movies?

*dreamy sigh*

[dANdeLION]

Don't let her lie to you. She LOVES Orlando Bloom; she keeps talking about going to Disney World just to be near his first name! But, back on topic, I think the real difficulty behing putting novels on the big screen is the lack of book shelves on said screen; every time I try to put a book on it, it just slides off.