Why books don't transfer well into film
Stop me if this has happened to you : You eagerly await the coming out of your favourite book into film. You sit at the edge of your seat waiting for that crucial scene, that favourite character to do the lines that you paid 8 bucks to see.
Only it never happens.
And instead of watching Aunt Lucy trek a mystic mountain into the sunset, you see Uncle Lou watch his dog die. Or they miss the whole point of the movie entirely, mesh a bunch of characters together to get one mushed up distorted mess. You leave the cinema with a feeling of complete disappointment
Everyone else around you however, gleefully get out of the film telling you " That was awesome the way Uncle Lou flew up in triumph". And of course, you can't help spoiling the moment by clarifying all the different points that make it a bad interpretation of the book. Being " Miss book" has it's disadavantages as years later people come up to you asking about minute details of some obscure reference in the film.
So why do so many books have bad film interpretations? The first reason is time constraint. You can't mush up four hundred pages of painstaking character development in two hours. It just won't happen. So the screenwriter often goes for the feel of the book rather than the whole plot.
Take for example when they mushed up Queen of the Damned and Lestat, two books in one film? Impossible, So they did away with a lot of the mythology ( which is good chunk of the book) to basically give us the feeling of recklessness that Akasha represented. ( But boy did it hurt seeing Pandora and Armand reduced to brief caricatures)
The second big thing is limited budget. JK Rowling once said that she had complete freedom and unlimited budget in her books. The same doesn't ring true with the films no matter how much money those things rake in, CGI is expensive and takes a lot of time to develop and when it comes out rushed, well it looks like the second movie. ( The spider effects were so ridiculous it seemed like a cartoon. Another example of that is the idiotic scorpion king effects in the Mummy Returns which was a good movie but I digress...)
What is really crucial, though, is that films are a visual medium. Books can go into the character's psyches. So if they stare into space for long periods of time, we know why that is. Movies, however , just can't let Angelou stare into space without offering something visual for us to interpret. ( And this goes back to time constraint...ah the vicious circle).
While all of these are key points, it still doesn't justify bad writing. Nothing irks me more than some hack screenwriter deciding that they know better than oh, a nobel prize winner. So they decided to botch up a scene for no reason whatsoever other than the fact that they felt like it. Ugh.
Take for example :
House of Spirits
Not only did they skip a generation ( in Isabel Allende's book they had three generations not two), they mushed up so many stories into one that we didnit know where one began and one ended.
And casting Americans who use botched up Chilean accents, yet Jeremy Irons has a british accent? Continuity people. Read up on it.
And the ending seemed so rushed that it basically ruined the whole point of Allende's book. Thanks Hollywood.
When films do get it right, it's when they understand what they are writing about, and realize how to transfer those very sentiments into film. You can tell when a screenwriter and director have " drunk Up" the material and produced a beautiful piece. For example :
The Joy Luck Club
This has to be one of the most literal interpretations of the book. Not only do we get the majority of the characters backstory and of six generations (not an easy feat considering that there are three daughter stories and three mother stories) but we get the misplaced identity, the mistakes passed from mother to daughter and the feeling of synthetic transference. The screenwriter knew which things to cut out or were not necessary for plot development, but left in the vital parts of what made this story so memorable. ( The scene where one of the characters tells her estranged husband , in the rain, that she taught him that she wasn't good enough is an amazing scene).
And of course Lord of the Rings which we all know was so brilliant in capturing the Tolkien's world ( my only complaint there is that they should have shown the romance between Eowyn and Faramir, just for justice sake...yeah they were " standing " together when Aragorn was named king it still doesn't count.) They even had the brilliant idea of making Arwen much more of a relevant character, whereas in the book she was a mere appendix .
And then there are some screenplays which are actually better than the original. Take the English Patient, a droll boring book about a nurse in her spinsterhood, and the English Patient who is barely mentioned. Fast forward to a sweeping love story and crying man watching his beloved die.
Good film. Bad book
Hey , it happens.
Can anyone think of more bad films interpretations or good film interpretations or even better than the original interpretations? If so discuss below.
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An often discussed topic here at orble, here is a link to one we had recently on flickwit.com . there you will find some great comments on this topic.
I agree that it's heart wrenching when a terrific novel is destroyed on film.
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A Clockwork Orange is an interesting remake of a book, especially since Kubrick didn't actually make the Burgess' version of the book...
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In 1994 there was a movie version done of Little Women which I thought was great. It starred Susan Sarandon, Claire Danes, Christian Bale and a young Kirsten Dunst as Amy, and each played their characters to perfection.
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Nice post, can't be bothered writing what I think of various film adaptations since as JD says I recently wrote a post on them! Lol. (Thanks JD).
But will say - great inclusion of House of Spirits. Didn't think of that and Allende is a perfect example of a sensational writer who has had her work decimated on screen.
Michaelie
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one thing that IRKS me to no end is when people say " oh why read the book just wait till the film comes out"...grrrr.
That said sometimes the best solution is a miniseries for complex books..
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You're not stepping on my toes, trust me - there is always room for more discussion, you're right!
A miniseries for more complex books - absolutely. Two hours of film will rarely fulfill the requirements of adapting those kinds of texts. Often you just end up with a watered down, cut to pieces version which does the book no justice or even detracts from it.
North and South and Jane Eyre are classics that I am very glad were done over a four hour film series.
Michaelie