Zar

The titular phrase of my thread represents one of the most detested statements that can be made by a film critic, novice or professional, in my opinion. I instantly want to reject any statements that come from a person who utters this anathema.

Film is not literature and never will be and never should be. It is an utterly different medium. It cannot hope to do what a book does, and a book cannot hope to do what a film does. At most, a film is a "riff" on a books ideas. Filmmakers are not slavishly tied to a book they base their film on, and those who try to be are attempting the impossible. Film is a thing unto itself, and I think many a film is probably more interesting than the book it came from.

One prime example is "The Shining". I read the book and saw the film. I liked them both separately for different reasons, but ultimately they were different conceptions of the idea.

Discuss.

Friar Bellows

I totally agree. My favourite example is Solaris. I enjoyed both Stanislaw Lem's book and Andrei Tarkovsky's film. If I wrote a book and later you made a film out of my book, I would feel insulted if you followed the book slavishly. Read my book -- don't recite it! Reading means creating your own interpretation. So obviously, if you really read my book, if you really took my book seriously, you would create a film which was your own unique artistic vision, a personal interpretation -- and not a slavish copy -- of my book. I might not like your interpretation, but I'd respect you for creating one.

And I'd enjoy the royalties.

Oxymoron

A good book lends itself to interpretation. Therefore, any given director/screenwriter may have an interpretation different from another. Which makes it interesting.

In fact, it's all interpretation when you think about it. What are they key events in the book? What and how do the characters think? What are the themes you want to present and what is superfluous? These are subjective quantities.

Oh, and also it's not possible to map one-to-one "book time" and "film time". The techniques used for story development (and character development) are quite different. Books take days or weeks to read; films need to deliver in two or three hours. They are very different media, so it is not surprising that they present the same subject matter differently.

I am currently reading Lord of the Rings to my unborn baby daughter (due in April). It's my third read of the books, and I am surprised how different the books and the films really are. And yet, somehow the FTOR film captured the essence of the book whilst missing events, dialogue, nuances and characters. I guess I have to define "essence" now...

Arvel Joffi

I still get upset when I feel that film changes more than details, when it changes the whole point of the story or mises the "essence" of a character.

I also think Fellowship of the Ring was damned good adaptation, but there were details that I couldn't help but be upset about (Gimli as clown, Galadriel's awful, blaring transformation, etc).

An excellent example of book-to-film changes is Catch Me If You Can. Both the film and the book are enjoyable (neither is a great work, just fun). The events in the movie are markedly different from the book, but the film captures and reinterprets the feel of the story and the characters flawlessly.

I find that I can't stand either Dune adaptation. I find them to simply be poor films.

Feather

Well, there's a difference between actually adapting a book to film and merely playing off the popularity of a book by claiming the film is an adaptation.

A recent example of the former is indeed the The Lord of the Rings movies. They don't change overmuch (although I personally found the changes disappointing) and they don't abridge overmuch. They also actually follow the story and premise that the author used for his book.

There are, however, many examples of films that don't even bother with the actual story in a book. Two such are Starship Troopers (Heinlein) and Vampires (always forget the name of this author--Steakly, I think; also wrote Armor).

So the phrase "But it's not like the book!" can be overly critical (who wants to watch a movie that is mere pictoral regurgitation of a book--that's what imagination is all about), I don't think it usually is.

More often than not, directors and producers take a grotesque amount of "artistic licence" and instead of telling the author's story, they tell their own while essentially plagiarizing the author's creative work (to create the fictional world and characters and such). There's no reason for this other than for said directors and producers to feed their own egos, in my opinion.

Manta

I look at the difference this way...

When I read "Tommyknockers" I imagined the characters to appear one way...and when I saw the movie, I thought it was a HORRID way to interpret what was in my head to the screen (yeah, it was a TV movie...but still).

Given rewrites for brevity, some things have to be shaved off...using the same movie, I got the picture in my head of a tremendous ship - but apparently that would have cost too much to actually recreate for the movie.

*shrug*

They need to look into my head to see what I like next time

Zadok001

I disagree in part. While a filmmaker obviously should not slave themselves to the book, changes should not be made that actively weaken the story without some noticable return.

The best example of this is likely The Relic. The movie is an absolute abomination, the book is enjoyable, if simplistic and light. The problem seems to stem from the fact that the movie changed the tone of the novel entirely, which left a lot of the plot without firm footing. (The novel leaves the question of "Monster or no?" open until about the 3/4s mark. The movie answers it within fifteen minutes. As a result, most of the tension is sucked out of the sequences involving characters trying to determine whether the monster is real or not.)

Ab_Normal

Most movies should be labeled as "inspired by" instead of "based on". If they're going to say, "based on [title]", I at least want to see a resemblance between the plot and characters of the movie and the book. I understand that structural changes have to be made to accomodate the different media, but travesties like Starship Troopers and Vampires (by John Steakley, thanks Feather) absolutely ignore the author's work.

edited to add: Oh, yeah, looking up Vampires reminded me of Francis Ford Copolla's Dracula (it certainly wasn't Bram Stoker's story). Look, if the director is going to completely change the relationships between the protagonists and the antagonist, they shouldn't use the original author's name in the title!

Corwin

I have to agree with Ab. Movies like ST are nothing more than plagarism. Vanderhooven took a classic work and destroyed it to make his film. He used the popularity of Heinlein's book as a marketing tool, then took the important parts of the story and either ignored them, or distorted them to suit his own agenda.

I was disappointed with both Dunes as well, for similar reasons. (Although I've finally gotten around to seeing the miniseries, and it wasn't horrible.) Dune is an amazingly complex book, and I doubt any screen adaptation can ever be completely accurate.... but every one of them seems to miss the point entirely, and edit out not unnesecary details, but critical plot points! The Gom Jabbar test in the miniseries is a case in point. Mohaim comes off looking like nothing more than a cruel sadist because they completely ignore WHY that test is performed.... it's a central theme to the Bene Gesserit and a pretty critical plot element as the story progresses through the books.... and there's no mention of it at all.

Zar

Again, I'll return to "The Shining". Stanley Kubrick all but totally changed the story and its meanings. He also added layers to the thematics of that film that surely do not exist in the Stephen King book. The choice of photographic style is Kubricks and does not derive from the book either (how could it?) But its great!

Even if a filmmaker actually attempts to transcribe a book into a film, like a human photocopier, he will invariably interpret things differently from a given reader. Artists and set designers will also render things as their imagination sees them, not as yours see them. This should be obvious, but it seems far from it for many people, even professional critics. The point is whether you find the filmmakers conceptions and inspirations interesting.

Also, although film can afford multiple interpretations, it is also more confining and coercive than a book in other ways. You are looking at or listening to this particular person, that particular face, this particular room or that particular house. This is not the object of your imagination! It is a forced march down the path of another imagintion. There is not the same time to reflect, you are just carried along. The images proceed at an inexorable pace within about a two-hour span. Temporal considerations create as much of an impression as relational considerations and even become part of them.

Look at it this way. The "spell" that a book creates when you read it is as much your creation as it is the authors. The author teases your brain to fill in many blanks. Your brain uses the material it has rattling round inside of it as building blocks. Interpretations and parallels that you see will not be the same as everyone else. Some people, such as Stanley Kubrick, frankly have more to say and can see a far greater web of ideas in the human experience than, say a typical high-school sophomore who reads "The Shining." So, his moulding and rendering of the idea could vastly differ. He will fit the story elements into a different hierarchy of priorities and thoughts, using the story as an example of a certain phenomenon (i.e., the machine that perpetuates man's violence against his fellow man.)

Based on all these considerations, a filmmaker has little choice but to "destroy" a book, however great it is. "Les Miserables" the musical "destroys" the book. The film "destroys" the book and the musical. There is no escape.

Give it up and just look at each thing on its own merits. They are by nature mere ghostly reverberations of each other.