If you’ve ever had to read a 700-page novel in a week packed with classes, work, extracurricular activities and the other niceties of university life, the thought of renting the tome’s film adaptation can be tempting.
But, although filmmakers have tried to adapt novels into films, there are major difficulties in trying to achieve a successful adaptation, said film professor Clarke Mackey. “It’s almost the worst possible combination of two things because they’re so different from each other,” he said. “It seems too obvious.”
Mackey said the imaginative work a film dealer does when approaching his particular medium varies greatly from a reader’s.
“In a novel, you’re told what the characters are thinking and you have to imagine what they look like and the world they live in,” he said. “When you watch a movie, you know what they look like, you know what the world is that they’re living in, but you have to imagine what they’re thinking.
“To somehow translate that story—a novel which is a form of literature that relates to the internal working of a human being to a place where all you see are people’s actions—is extremely difficult, and I don’t think it works very well most of the time.”
Only four of the winners for Best Picture at the Academy Awards over the last 20 years were adapted from novels, Mackey noted.
“The Academy Award winners that have been novels in the past twenty years have been Lord of the Rings, Out of Africa, The English Patient and Silence of the Lambs,” he said. “The rest of the movies are either original screenplays or they’re based on non-fiction.”
Mackey said adapting novels into films could also be problematic when trying to balance the inclusion of all the elements of a novel while keeping the running time of the film reasonable.
“It’s almost better to make [a] movie out of a short story because movies are usually 90 to 200 minutes long and a novel usually takes a few days to read because there’s a lot more detail,” he said.
Although there are a few exceptions, Mackey said he generally tells aspiring screenwriters not to adapt novels into films.
“I think it does a disservice to literature most of the time,” he said. “There are a few exceptions, but because film is such a specific medium with its own rules and [its] own way of communicating, I think it’s better for people to just start from scratch.”
As for deciding whether to read the novel or rent it’s film counterpart, Mackey said it comes down to a matter of personal preference.
“If you want to go into the inner mind of individual characters and find out how they feel inside of themselves and explore the inner life of people, a novel is a better form of storytelling,” he said. “If you want to observe actions from the outside, if you want to decode things and tell a story that’s a series of behaviors and actions that people do and you want to evoke a world that has a lot of visual detail, then a movie is the way to go.”
English Professor Molly Wallace said reading is good practice for the imagination, because the mind produces accompanying visual imagery.
“Books highlight language; films highlight the visual,” she said. “This is not to say that language isn’t important in film, but books force attentiveness to language.”
Wallace said although there’s a chance of the novel’s meaning being lost when it’s made into a movie, a film adaptation is an interesting reading of the original.
“Novels have many meanings, as do films, and I think the danger is less that the meaning of the novel will be lost than that one meaning will be highlighted while others are downplayed,” she said. “A film adaptation is an interpretation of a novel in a new medium as long as one sees the two not as related, but importantly distinct.”
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