The Art of Adaptation

Abstract

The following essay is an edited paper originally written for English 201 at Redeemer University. The original assignment was to write an analytical essay explaining an aspect of writing culture. One of the suggested prompts was “the process of turning novels into movies.” As soon as I saw that prompt, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I had had some version of this essay banging about my head for some time now, and this assignment finally gave me the opportunity to put it on paper.

Introduction

Screenwriters and filmmakers, when approaching the adaptation of a book or a story, take radically different approaches in how they translate the content of the page into something suitable for the screen. Some adaptations maintain a firm faithfulness to the letter of the source material and aim to remake the original work for the screen. Others take on more nuanced approaches to adaptation and restructure the story but maintain the same core message.

Other adaptations bear few resemblances to the original work: they may use the same title, the same premise, or the same outline of the characters, but produce radically different products by changing motivations or adding and removing plot points. In the wildest of examples, filmmakers will take only the structure of the original literary work and alter it so profoundly that only those intimately familiar with both will be able to notice the adaptation.

Films adapted from other texts - novels, novellas, short stories, comic books - have a somewhat negative and undeserved reputation in certain circles. The phrase “the book was better” is often used in a dismissive tone to brush past adaptations and degrade them as a sort of lesser medium. Despite so many of the great films being adaptations of literary works, there is still this stigma that surrounds the adaptation. To paraphrase scholar Simone Murray, film adaptations are seen as the bastard offspring of literature and cinema and are looked down upon because of it (Murray 4).

Perhaps these ideas are the result of a misunderstanding of how filmic adaptations work. In order to change this outlook, I will explore how adaptations are constructed, explain the primary paradigms filmmakers use when coming into contact with a text, and how these paradigms inform their process of adaptation.

Three Adaptational Paradigms

In her essay “‘The Accidental Tourist’ On Page and On Screen: Interrogating Normative Theories About Film Adaptation,” professor and scholar Karen E. Kline argues that there are four primary paradigms to adaptation critique and analysis: translation, pluralism, transformation, and materialism.

Kline’s paradigms serve as the basis, but not as the entirety, of our conversation of how filmmakers approach adaptation. Her ideas are centred around critical evaluation of adaptations and not the process behind their creation.  For my purposes, I will be looking at the first three paradigms she outlines which are just as applicable to filmmaking as they are to film theory.

Translation

The translational paradigm judges the effectiveness of a given adaptation by its faithfulness to the core of the original text. Kline argues that the translation adaptation is about “fidelity” to the “letter” original work “particularly with regard to narrative elements, such as character, setting, and theme” (Kline 70). When people use the argument that a film was not good because it “wasn’t like the book,” they inadvertently enter into a translational framework. Here, accuracy to the source material in all elements is essential.

Many of the great film adaptations are translations of the original material onto the screen. Joel and Ethan Coen’s Best Picture-winning film  No Country for Old Men (2007) is a translational adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. The film changes minor elements of the plot or characters and alterations it does make pertain more to the trimming of the figurative fat from the story. Certain backstories are removed and the novel’s ongoing narration by the character of Sheriff Bell appears in the film primarily as dialogue rather than narration.

Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001 - 2003) can be seen as a translation of the original novel into a set of films. Jackson’s alterations are practical. They trim the story into a form better designed for a film, move around a few minor characters and events, but do not change anything crucial to the original text.

One of the most remarkable translations is Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 retelling of Hamlet, written, directed, and starring Branagh. This particular version was significant for being the first and only theatrically released adaptation of the play to use the entire original text. Branagh’s adaptation runs at 242 minutes, or just over four hours, in length. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Branagh spoke to why he felt he had to make the full play into a film.

I passionately believe that [Hamlet] hasn’t been done the fullest justice to on-screen because people have no included every character, they’ve not had a chance to make the connection the play makes between the very personal story of a family in crisis and an epic that changes the ruler of a nation by the end of the play. [...] I gathered absolutely everyone together the day before we started shooting [...] just to say, “you know, whatever happens to this film, we are doing something unique. [...] This will never be done like this again [sic]. (Branagh, “Kenneth Branagh”)

Branagh was right in many respects. An adaptation of Shakespeare’s work that is as complete as Branagh’s has not been attempted since. As a passionate lover of Shakespeare, Branagh felt it necessary to be as translational as he could out of respect for the original material and the original story. To capture everything the play means and represents, Branagh and his crew had to adapt the entirety of the play (“Kenneth Branagh”).

Pluralism

The pluralist paradigm regards a film’s adaptational “value” as being able “to present a coherent fictive world within itself which bears significant traces of the novel operating at a somewhat abstract emotional/intellectual level” (Kline 71). When a given film captures the spirit of the novel, but not necessarily all of the literary elements, we find that it is pluralist in its approach. Kline expands on her earlier thoughts by saying that the “central concern from this critical perspective [is] the film’s ability to exist in its own right but also to convey such qualities as the novel’s mood, tone, and values” (72).

Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) is a fantastic example of pluralistic adaptation in action. The film details the first arrival of aliens to planet Earth and the job of a linguist, Louise, to open communication between the “heptapods” and humans. Adapted from the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, the film bears distinct and significant changes to the original text. The short story has the alien heptapods far away from Earth and are communicating via telecommunication software, whereas, in the film, the aliens arrive on the planet. There are also some changes made to the timeline of the film’s many flashforwards into Louise’s future.

While on the podcast The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer says that many of the primary changes “came out of a need for conflict and tension” (“Arrival Q&A). Heisserer talks about his great admiration for Chiang’s writing but concedes that it has no real ability to be adapted into a film.

Ted’s story is elegant and evocative and very literary and has no drama there on that level. It just- you’re like, “wow, it’s great,” then you transfer and you’re like “oh, I am so screwed.” There is no film here. [...] I can’t have them spend a year in a room skype-ing with some aliens. This is not a film! The first major change that I pitched to him and that we brought to it was: ‘they show up at our door’ [sic]. (“Arrival Q&A”).

Heisserer uses this pluralist approach to craft a film true to the essentials of Chiang’s original, but makes it suitable for the big screen. Certain elements of the story simply will not work in a cinematic context, but the heart of the story is worth adapting.

Transformation

Kline’s third paradigm is the transformation approach. Transformationalist approaches to adaptation revolve around how well the film holds up as an independent work of art separate from the limitations of the source material. Kline says that “this approach consider[s] the novel raw material which the film alters significantly so that the film becomes an artistic work in its own right” (Kline 72). Transformationalist adaptations are often some of the most exciting and offer up new and unexpected ways to approach the written word.

When approaching his science fiction-horror film Annihilation (2018), filmmaker Alex Garland had to make a transformationalist adaptation out of necessity. The original novel by Jeff Vandermeer is an atmospheric, first-person book that is very much about the internal emotions of its unnamed protagonist. In an interview with The Ringer, Garland said that the first thing that attracted him to the novel “was the atmosphere” and that the whole book had the feeling of a “dream” (Fennessey, “Alex Garland Leaves Nothing Behind”).

Garland elaborates on the process of adapting such a difficult book and expressing those feelings to the novel’s author. He recalls telling Vandermeer “‘I don’t know how to do a faithful adaptation of your book. I just literally don’t know how to do it. And if what you need is a faithful adaptation, then you will need someone else, because I’m not the guy who’s going to be able to do that [sic]’” (“Alex Garland Leaves Nothing Behind”).

Of course, not every transformationalist adaptation is out of necessity. Sometimes, transformation happens to recontextualize a familiar story in a new light. Akira Kurosawa created two great transformationalist approaches to the works of Shakespeare with his films Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985). The two films, respectively, adapt Macbeth and King Lear into two epics set in Samurai-era Japan. In the transformation, only the bones of the story have remained and the rest has been rebuilt from the ground up. The characters and motivations have fundamentally changed making the two films almost unrecognizable from the original.

Francis Ford Coppola made similar changes when he adapted the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad into Apocalypse Now (1979). Coppola moves the story of British colonialism in nineteenth-century Congo to the twentieth-century Vietnam War. The intense prose of the novella is exchanged for complex, rich visuals. The historical and political elements have wildly changed making Apocalypse Now stand apart almost completely from Heart of Darkness.

Conclusion

Branagh, Heisserer, and Garland are far from the only sources on film adaptation. Hundreds of filmmakers have spoken at length about adapting literary works. Greta Gerwig has several lengthy interviews on her 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women. Coppola, who in addition to Apocalypse Now also created the famed adaptation The Godfather (1979), has broken down how he moved those two films from the pages of a book into a fully realized film.

Director Barry Jenkins has gone into great detail about the unique adaptation of processes of his films Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), the first based on a play and the second on a novel by James Baldwin. Writer Susan Orlean has spoken about her thoughts as an author whose work was adapted into a film (Orlean’s novel The Orchid Thief was the basis of the film Adaptation. (2002), a film about adaptation).

Ever since the inception of the art form, filmmakers have been adapting existing literary works into cinematic forms. The first attempts to adapt literary work can be traced back to the early twentieth century with the short films adapting a simplified version of their source material. It is as much of a staple of cinema as any other type of filmmaking and yet it is so often viewed negatively.

Filmmakers are open and honest about their adaptation processes. By understanding these artists and how they approach their work, we can understand filmic adaptation and no longer limit it to trivial comparisons between two radically different mediums. If we’re willing to learn, we can come to appreciate the art of adaptation a little more.

Works Cited

“Arrival Q&A.” The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, from Jeff Goldsmith, 12 Nov. 2016, open.spotify.com/episode/2pFNLuQtiXBuZcWymX3jH7?si=eLHEjuY7SeODwJKMm9MSUQ. 

Branagh, Kenneth. “Kenneth Branagh.” Charlie Rose, By Charlie Rose, PBS, 23 Dec. 1996, charlierose.com/videos/12186. 

Fennessey, Sean. “Alex Garland Leaves Nothing Behind.” The Ringer, 23 Feb. 2018, www.theringer.com/movies/2018/2/23/17036466/alex-garland-annihilation-interview-ex-machina. Accessed 8 Nov. 2020.

Kline, Karen E. “‘The Accidental Tourist’ On Page and On Screen: Interrogating Normative Theories About Film Adaptation.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 1, Salisbury University, 1996, pp. 70-83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43796701. 

Murray, Simone. “Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1, Salisbury University, 2008, pp. 4-20. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43797393. 

Thompson, Anne. “‘Annihilation’ Director Alex Garland Speaks Out on Screwing With Genre and Studio Panic Attacks.” IndieWire, 8 Apr. 2018, www.indiewire.com/2018/04/annihilation-director-alex-garland-devs-television-1201950154/. Accessed 8 Nov. 2020.