
Adapting from different formats
The arena of language
Film has nothing to do with literature; the character and substance of the two art forms are usually in conflict. This probably has something to do with the receptive processes of the mind. The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious act of the will in alliance with the intellect; little by little it affects the imagination and the emotions. The process is different with a motion picture. When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for the illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination.”
Ingmar Bergman, “Bergman Discusses Film-making”.
Generally movie people avoid books as if they were used needles”
David Thomson, Guardian 06.07.13
Never judge a book by its movie …”
Movie maxim
Reading a book, especially an engrossing book, is to experience language as one of the purest and most transparent forms of communion. To be ‘lost in a book’ is a transfigurative experience; the words on a page can transport a reader to a ‘different place’, an interior mental arena which is capable of being transformative and magical.
The language used in a script, however, has a number of different tasks to perform, and the words are never an end in themselves. They are signposts, indicators of what the script aspires to become – that is a ‘live’ event occurring in real time. This is the intended experience, something we witness externally, that engages us through dramatic means.
The currency of drama is events and the focus is on the action. Character and dialogue are major preoccupations but only in service to the main task that the scriptwriter has set himself: to bring a story successfully to life and to do it within a set time.
This constraint of time is one of the major differences between the leisurely act of reading, which can be protracted indefinitely, and the commitment that is asked of an audience to watch a film or a play on the stage.
When people say, “Is it like the book?” the answer is, “There has never in the history of the world been a movie that’s really been like the book.” Everybody says how faithful “Gone with the Wind” was. Well, “Gone with the Wind” was a three-and-a half-hour movie, which means you are talking about maybe a two-hundred-page screenplay of a nine-hundred-page novel in which the novel has, say, five hundred words per page; and the screenplay has maybe forty, maybe sixty, depending on what’s on the screen, maybe one hundred and fifty words per page. But you’re taking a little, teeny slice; you’re just extracting little, teeny essences of scenes. All you can ever be in an adaptation is faitllful in spirit”.
William Goldman
Narrative shape and structure
Prose narratives are constrained by their length but the shape and texture of the narrative is much more fluid and influenced by a number of factors. One of these is the style of narration. From a screenwriter’s perspective, the narrative becomes more ‘focused’ or ‘diffused’ depending on these choices. The balance between ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ stories (see Classic Story Structure) is also important.
Often the most powerful scenes in a novel are those that deal with complex emotional or psychological states but these do not translate easily to the screen:
The rendition of mental states – memory, dream, imagination – cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language… The film, by arranging external signs for our visual perception, or by presenting us with dialogue, can lead us to infer thought. But it cannot show us thought directly. It can show us characters thinking, feeling, and speaking, but it cannot show us their thoughts and feelings. A film is not thought; it is perceived.”
George Bluestone, Novels into Film
For this reason, writers like Hemingway and Faulkner lend themselves easily to film adaptation with their stripped down prose while so-called ‘stream of consciousness’ writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf present more of a challenge.
It is also often necessary to distil simpler narratives shapes from books that are densely plotted. Significantly a number of successful films have been made from novellas or short stories (i.e. Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds”) because it is easier to expand a narrative than condense it.
(Unfinished – awaiting content)
Adaptation – From “The Art Of Watching Films”