What makes a great film adaptation, from Shining to Trainspotting — SkimNews
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- 'The Book Was Better' is a new book by the article's author, drawn from watching dozens of adaptations including the 'soft rock opera musical' Heathcliff, 1996's The Island of Dr Moreau, and a three-part Atlas Shrugged she describes as horrible.
- The author rejects the idea that only lesser novels make great films, countering it with Trainspotting, A Clockwork Orange, The Go-Between and The Leopard, while conceding that 'workmanlike' novels like Jaws, The Godfather and The Exorcist were elevated to genius on screen.
- Infidelity is a virtue in adaptation, per the piece: Hitchcock said he read The Birds only once before filming; Paul Thomas Anderson advised to 'steal the parts that you need, and then run as fast as you can'; one screenwriter was reportedly told not to read the novel he was adapting.
- Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 Children of Men transformed PD James's cerebral theological novel into a populist dystopian thriller about immigration and terror, using only the central conceit of a world without children; James, the article notes, was delighted with the result.
- Sally Potter's Orlando treated Virginia Woolf's novel 'as if the book never existed,' recasting it as a lavish rebuke to the UK establishment's passage of Section 28; Potter said she was 'cruel to the novel to be kind to the film.'
- Casting can deliberately wrongfoot audiences, per the piece: Hitchcock chose the sweet-faced Anthony Perkins for Norman Bates despite Robert Bloch's novel describing him as physically repellent, and Jodie Foster lobbied for Clarice Starling by reframing the story as a woman saving another woman 'while all these fucking men get in the way.'
- The author faults Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey for making her feel she had 'been in a war: long periods of boredom and waiting punctuated by violence,' wondering if Nolan 'overthought it and should have felt it instead,' citing Hilary Mantel's advice to 'put down the text, and dream it.'
Why it matters: The piece lands as a counter-argument to the loud social-media pile-ons hitting recent literary adaptations like Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights and the Thursday Murder Club film, suggesting faithful reverence is often what kills an adaptation. For studios weighing the next Austen or Brontë project, the operative lesson is that the most enduring screen versions, from Psycho to Children of Men, deliberately broke with their sources.
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