Why The Book Is Often Better Than The Movie

WHY ADAPT MOVIES?

Cinema has a long history of transforming literary works into movies. This makes sense for a few reasons.

Firstly, a large proportion of audiences will already be aware of the story and characters. Therefore, it’s easier to market the movies and get the existing fanbase into seats without needing to sell a completely new concept, world or story to audiences with promotional materials. 

Secondly, some of the best, most inventive and iconic stories which build their own worlds were written as novels. So, there is great subject matter to choose from. However, adapting an existing story to the screen also comes with some baggage.

DIFFERENT IMAGINATIONS

 When reading novels, your brain uses the descriptors written by the author and your imagination fills in the image - kind of like how AI can create images from prompts.

Depending on what AI you use, or what prompt you give, you’ll get different variations of images and different interpretations. The same is true of humans.  Different directors and audience members will interpret texts differently, not only visually, but also thematically.

This is especially true in texts where the descriptions are a bit vague. Here’s an example. When I say gollum from Lord of The Rings, anyone who has seen the movie will immediately think the character looks like this.

However, illustrator Tove Jansson imagined and represented gollum like this, based on Tolkien’s description of a ‘slimy creature’, ‘as dark as darkness’ with ‘big, round pale eyes in his thin face’.

This disparity in how the character was imagined made Tolkien add an extra adjective ‘small’ to the description in later editions. The point is, different people will imagine things differently.

This applies to the landscapes the stories take place against, how the characters look, what actors are cast, or how key props or objects are rendered. If these representations go against the mainstream audience imagination they may not be well received.

If directors manage to get past this first hurdle and present a visual world that is palatable to the majority of the audience and aligns with the mainstream imagination, they are faced with another hurdle.

EXPRESSING INTERNAL THOUGHTS

How do you express internal monologues, omniscient narration and emotions of characters, that is easily done in the literary form? 

One technique that filmmakers have is to use voice over from either the character themself, or voice over from a narrator. However, in many contexts this technique can quickly get overused and disrupt the flow of the movie. Whereas novels can break down thoughts, emotions, and internal explanations at any point they wish, easily, through text.

Other methods that have been used to provide information and context to audiences include: dream sequences, flashbacks and one character telling another a story or explaining something on screen.  

These attempts to express internal thoughts about the plot in the form of dialogue can often come out as clunky exposition, which is another reason why translating the thoughts of characters in books to the screen is a challenge.

Good adaptations focus on the characters: and allow the story to be told through the actions of the characters, rather than aligning plot points and then manipulating the characters to get to the plot.

SHOW DON’T TELL    

Two good rules to overcome exposition are: show rather than tell and delay giving expositional information for as long as possible. 

This is usually reliant on great performances from actors who can project their internal emotions and thoughts externally. Likewise, the language of the camera can also be used to express information. 

Take this scene from No Country For Old Men - which conveys a huge amount of information without any dialogue. It’s shot from the perspective of Chigurh, so we’re seeing things unfold at the same time he is - delaying revealing expositional information.

He opens the door with a cattle gun. Lots of information here: firstly he’s clearly in a rural, farming area that would have such a tool, secondly he can clearly adapt to his surrounds using whatever he finds, thirdly, he makes a noise and is confident enough in his violent ability that he doesn’t seem to care about people noticing him.

He finds unopened letters - we know that whoever he’s looking for has been gone a while. There’s an unmade bed, hangers from hastily packed clothes and an open window - we know the person has left in a hurry. He grabs some milk from the fridge and drinks it. The milk is still good so whoever he’s after couldn’t have left more than a couple days ago. 

The camera pushes in - getting inside his head. His thoughtful, slow, calculating psychopathic calm behaviour as an intruder is very uneasy.

Then after this mountain of information has been revealed entirely visually - it’s confirmed through a later dialogue exchange with a woman.

This is how good adaptations of books reveal information - by leaning on cinema’s visual tools, and controlling the flow of information to the audience, rather than by overusing expositional dialogue. 

STORY STRUCTURE

Another structural difference between books and movies is their length and how they are designed to be consumed.

Novels are by their very nature intended to be read over an extended period of time, in different sittings. Authors can delve into extreme detail like describing the world, adding backstory, getting inside the heads of characters, and they can elongate plots.

Movies are designed to be consumed in a single one and a half to three hour sitting. This means the plot from adapted works often needs to get enormously condensed, simplified, restructured or reinvented to make sense within the more limited time frame.

This can be at odds with what fans want - who are used to the greater plot nuances and depth in the original work.

A solution to this has been to create a series of instalments - breaking the movies into multiple parts. This hasn’t always been successful.

Pacing an adaptation through the writing and editing needs to strike a balance between giving justice to the original story and plot, re-writing or removing excessive side storylines and not overstretching the existing material.

The way that Peter Jackson ends The Return Of The King is a good example. After the ring is destroyed in the film’s climax and the characters return to the Shire, Jackson cuts out the entire ‘Scouring of the Shire’ storyline from the book - where the hobbits retake the Shire through another battle to end Saruman’s rule.

Adding this would have both extended the movie’s run time too much, and goes against the classic three act structure in movies by introducing a second inferior climax after the true climax of destroying the ring.

CREATING TONE

One of the most challenging parts of adapting an existing work to the screen is finding the correct tone that pays homage to the story’s intention: whether that’s creating a feeling of wonder, an uneasy suspense, or action.  

A number of filmmaking tools can be used to achieve this feeling: from the score to the set design to the lighting. An example of visually creating different tones can be seen in how cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, Peter Jackson and the rest of the crew created a unique look for each ‘realm’ or location - which also expressed an emotional tone.

The Shire is green, lush and characters are backlit with golden sunlight that is comforting, homely and natural.

Bree needed to feel a bit more aggressive with a sense of foreboding. So they pushed a yellow-green tint in the grade that made skin tones a bit more sickly and lit it with hard light sources with jagged shadows.

For the magical safe haven of Rivendell they pushed a comforting, autumnal warm look in post production, lit scenes with more diffused, softer lighting with less intense shadows, and introduced digital diffusion into the image that created a blooming, smudgy, halation effect in the highlights that would come from using a strong Pro-Mist diffusion filter.    

Which again, contrasted heavily with the scenes in Mordor that tried to suck all life and vibrancy from the almost monochromatically neutral palette, lit by constantly gloomy, cloudy light.  

Each region carried its unique emotional tone not only through the visuals but also through the music.

CONCLUSION

Adapting fiction to the screen is beset by challenges: from bringing imagined imagery to life, expressing the internal thoughts of characters, restructuring and shortening the storyline to create an appropriate tone that aligns with the original source material.  

Truly doing stories justice requires directors to have a clear vision, which they refine and structure with careful pre-production planning, unhindered by ulterior financial motives, which is then supported and executed by a superb cast and technical crew.