What makes a good book-to-film adaptation?: an Investigation
A book-to-film adaptation is most definitely not an easy process. In a time when no one is afraid to scream on the internet about what is wrong with any given media project (myself included), being a writer trying to please hardcore readers as well as newcomers to the story must be a pretty scary situation to be in.
The ratio of success to failure is wide. Within the same company, for example, Netflix, you can come across a disaster such as the 2022 adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion (you can read me ranting about it here). But sometimes, when screenwriters and filmmakers get it right, beauties such as Netflix’s version of The Sandman (2022) show up on our screens.
Now, I am not here to talk about either of the films above, although they are a great illustration of the wide spectrum of paths that a book-to-screen adaptation might take.
I believe that by now you are probably scratching your head, and maybe thinking: “how can one adaptation work so well and the other not at all? If you adapt one book, you can surely adapt any other, right?”. Well, I wish I had a direct answer for that, but truthfully, no one really knows exactly what it is that makes one great and the other a stinker. Adapting something is a really subjective process, one that can be applied in as many different ways as there are different writers.
However, in order to try and understand how this process works, I will talk about three different points that seem to be constants in all instances of adaptations I have researched.
#1 Was the story read correctly?
I have started with a controversy, I know! But let me explain what I mean by reading correctly. First of all, I’d like to make a disclaimer that I don’t think most people make this mistake, of incorrectly reading a text. What happens most frequently is a misreading of the source material. This misreading can happen on many different levels.
The first one is the most basic: does the adapter understand the plot? It sounds simple but in some books this can be a big challenge. If you don’t fully grasp the situations unfolding across the pages, it might get very complicated when you’re trying to bring it to the screen.
The other type of misreading might arise due to a lack of understanding of character and subtext. This is by far, the most common misreading. A lot of adaptations follow the book’s plot, beat by beat, but completely miss the point when it comes to what exactly the story is talking about.
This is, personally, the biggest problem with adaptations. When you get characters acting in ways alien to how they were originally developed, plot points don’t make sense, because they don’t matter to the characters any longer.
But this is only the beginning, after you read a book you must start actually thinking how are you going to portray the story visually.
#2 Faithfulness to source material
Any piece of fiction is a product of its time: what people think about social issues, technology, media references. All of that and more can and will sip into the narrative and in the way characters behave with each other. The thing about this intertwining of ideals and morals is that it changes.
This might be a massive change, like the difference in morals and behaviours between Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) and its film adaptation, Clueless (1995). But it could also be something smaller, like the use of internet slang that has, in only a couple months, become obsolete.
These changes are often a point of heated debate. Some believe that extreme faithfulness to the source material is the way to go, claiming that any major changes are disrespectful to the author and their book. Others are a little more liberal in their approach, understanding and sometimes even expecting changes to be implemented.
As someone who has been on both sides of this debate, I must say that with time and experience, I have come to realise that adaptations with some changes are usually more successful in truly capturing the spirit of a book (more on that in our final topic). I will simply say that if I wanted to experience the book, following the plot beat by beat, I would have just read it over again!
The truth is that there is no one correct way. Every story will dictate what it needs to be depicted on the screen. Greta Gerwig, in adapting Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), gave the best possible explanation for this process. In a Writers Panel for the 2020 Santa Barbara Film Festival, Gerwig explained that her approach was to first, learn everything she could about the book: the time that it was set, the plot and characters, even the life of the author and her context at the time of writing. Then, she would take a detour into past adaptations of the same story — what she called the “urtext”.
This is the idea that it is not only the piece of art itself, but whatever has been said about it or adapted from it that will influence our perception of the original text. After familiarising herself with all of the urtext, which gave her perspective, Gerwig was able to hold on to the essence of the original, without having to repeat the same beats of previous readings of the novel.
You could say that Greta Gerwig was able to blend two different approaches. She maintained faithfulness to the characters and the truth of the book without being too attached to superficial details that are only a small part of a time and moment of history.
#3 Translation
Finally, after first reading the novel and thinking about all the elements that connect to create the story, the time comes to begin writing the screenplay. Actually, this is not simply writing, but a process of translation.
Besides telling a story, a book and a film work completely differently. A piece of prose is allowed a greater amount of time and space to develop its plot and characters, while a movie is usually confined to two hours (maybe eight for a TV series) to do the same work. Not only that, a book is able to navigate into characters’ minds, allowing readers to better understand their motives and actions. An audiovisual story does not have that luxury, unless you make the characters literally stop what they are doing and start to explain why they do what they do.
That exposition is sometimes necessary, but in order to create a believable human on screen, more often than not, screenwriters will create a situation or rearrange a moment from the book, in which the character is forced to take an action that presents the audience with their beliefs. Film adopts the philosophy that words mean nothing if you don’t act on them.
A great example of this thought-to action-switch is the 2020 TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018). The book is a great example of diving into characters’ minds. With a writing style that follows a stream of consciousness, we get to know the most intimate, at times embarrassing, and powerful thoughts these characters have. How do you translate that into images?
The answer is a mix of getting the characters to talk about their feelings, but mostly, making them act on these feelings. Actions always speak louder than words. It is also important to add that the process of casting your actors will be of extreme importance to this aspect of adaptation. Finding the people that best understand who the characters are will take your screenplay a long way.
There are countless book-to-film adaptations out there, classics like The Exorcist and The Shining (you know I had to bring horror into it) are examples of two completely different approaches that somehow work.
The truth of the matter is that writing an adaptation is an extremely complicated process, one that will always generate debate and propel people to look for new ways of telling stories.
What about you — do you have a favourite adaptation, or one one that you hate?
