More on Adaptation

Been away in Nelson for a few days - back into it today.

Let's talk about adaptation. The funniest and most insightful commentary on this is the Kaufman's film Adaptation, about the process of writing a screenplay based on the book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean.

Early in the script, Kaufman (a character in the film) says about transforming the book:

"I just don't want to ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing. You know? Like an orchid heist movie or something, or, y'know, changing the orchids into poppies and turning it into a movie about drug running, you know? ... I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases. You know? Or characters learning profound life lessons. Or growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end. You know? I mean, the book isn't like that, and life isn't like that. It just isn't."

Which is pretty much a description of exactly how the movie ends up.

When it came time to adapt my own novel, two things were necessary. The first was enough distance from it to be able to look at it as a story without feeling overly protective toward it. The second was the willingness to travel in new directions with characters and subplots. Fiction can meander, and the reader enjoy the distractions. In a film people will begin to drop off the narrative, and suddenly you've lost your audience.

And the hardest thing to get used to is an army of people reading your work in draft stage, each with their own bright ideas as to how it could be improved. Some of these insights, or 'notes', can be helpful and make for a stronger story. Some are so dumb that you just need to keep your lips pursed and think of England.

In the end, the screenwriter must live or die by their own sense of what the story is, who the characters are, and how the whole thing holds together. No one else in the team can take that responsibility, not even the director. A film is nothing if not an original insight into the human condition.

The trick is to recognise you're performing a heart transplant, and not just doing a precis of a book. Writers, like heart surgeons, struggle with the issue of rejection...