It is also fairly common for directors/writers to use a book as a inspiration but not care about the specific details because they want to express their own artistic vision. Hitchcock refused to adapt books that he considered ‘masterpieces’, since he saw no point in trying to improve them. When he adapted books (such as Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds) he used the source material as loose inspiration and made the films his own.
François Truffaut: Your own works include a great many adaptations, but mostly they are popular or light entertainment novels, which are so freely refashioned in your own manner that they ultimately become a Hitchcock creation. Many of your admirers would like to see you undertake the screen version of such a major classic as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for instance.
Alfred Hitchcock: Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else’s achievement. There’s been a lot of talk about the way in which Hollywood directors distort literary masterpieces. I’ll have no part of that! What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. I read it only once, and very quickly at that. An author takes three or four years to write a fine novel; it’s his whole life. Then other people take it over completely. Craftsmen and technicians fiddle around with it and eventually someone winds up as a candidate for an Oscar, while the author is entirely forgotten. I simply can’t see that.
FT: I take it then that you’ll never do a screen version of Crime and Punishment.
AH: Even if I did, it probably wouldn’t be any good.
FT: Why not?
AH: Well, in Dostoyevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function.
FT: That’s right. Theoretically, a masterpiece is something that has already found its perfection of form, its definitive form.
AH: Exactly, and to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six- to ten-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.
Alfonso Cuaron also liked the idea of Children of Men (the book) but disliked almost all the specific details, so he used his film as a chance to make all of the changes he wanted to see.
I would have assumed that this part of an essay by Stanley Kubrick was in reference to the Hitchcock/Truffaut interview, imagine my surprise when it turns out to be from 6 years earlier
It’s sometimes said that a great novel makes a less promising basis for a film than a novel which is merely good. I don’t think that adapting great novels presents any special problems which are not involved in adapting good novels or mediocre novels; except that you will be more heavily criticised if the film is bad, and you may be even if it’s good. I think almost any novel can be successfully adapted, provided it is not one whose aesthetic integrity is lost along with its length. For example, the kind of novel in which a great deal and variety of action is absolutely essential to the story, so that it loses much of its point when you subtract heavily from the number of events or their development.
Earlier on in the essay Kubrick suggests the best novels for cinematic adaption are:
....not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters.
That suggestion reflects the context of Tom Ford’s debut film, A Simple Man (which I think is an excellent film). Ford said in an interview about adapting the book to screen:
The book is beautiful, but you’re held captive by George’s thoughts. [in the book] there’s no plot, nothing happens in it. In the book, there are scenes. There’s no plot, but there are scenes. They just don’t correspond at all to what George is thinking. He’s doing the most mundane things, but his thoughts are what is interesting. He’s thinking about other things, not what he’s going through. I had to construct a plot and break it down into three acts, structure it, etc.
I find that last sentence very telling: “I had to construct a plot”. Cinematography is the writing of movement, in the most pedantic etymological sense, pensiveness isn’t very kinetic.
I could go on with a word salad of “show don’t tell” “character is action” yadda yadda
It is also fairly common for directors/writers to use a book as a inspiration but not care about the specific details because they want to express their own artistic vision. Hitchcock refused to adapt books that he considered ‘masterpieces’, since he saw no point in trying to improve them. When he adapted books (such as Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds) he used the source material as loose inspiration and made the films his own.
(From Hitchcock/Truffaut, quoted here).
Alfonso Cuaron also liked the idea of Children of Men (the book) but disliked almost all the specific details, so he used his film as a chance to make all of the changes he wanted to see.
I would have assumed that this part of an essay by Stanley Kubrick was in reference to the Hitchcock/Truffaut interview, imagine my surprise when it turns out to be from 6 years earlier
Earlier on in the essay Kubrick suggests the best novels for cinematic adaption are:
That suggestion reflects the context of Tom Ford’s debut film, A Simple Man (which I think is an excellent film). Ford said in an interview about adapting the book to screen:
I find that last sentence very telling: “I had to construct a plot”. Cinematography is the writing of movement, in the most pedantic etymological sense, pensiveness isn’t very kinetic.
I could go on with a word salad of “show don’t tell” “character is action” yadda yadda