‘Did you see the film?’
‘Yes, but it was not as good as the book.’
Is the book as good as the film or vice versa? At the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka, a discussion took place between a film director Lord (David) Puttnam and four authors who have had their books made into films or TV series.
Participants
Lord Puttnam: Best known for his film ‘Chariots of Fire’ and many others.
Shrabani Basu whose book and TV documentary ‘Victoria and Abdul’ have been widely admired.
Maylis de Kerangel, a French author of ‘Mend the Living’ about the two sides of a heart transplant, donor and recipient.
Sebastian Faulks, author of Charlotte Grey and Birdsong and other books that have been made into film.
Alexander McCall Smith whose series ‘The No I Ladies Detective Agency’ has a strong following both in text and on TV.
The Argument
There are two poles to the argument. Take the money on offer and run to the bank or to insist, as author and artist, on full control over the way your work is presented even to the point of halting production if you are dissatisfied with what the director is doing.
Somewhere in between lies the path to success.
Film directors are the guys who arrange the story-line, the camera angles, costume, actions and the creative, artistic part of a film. Producers are the guys who see to the contracts and funding and marketing.
In the beginning, when the film rights are being negotiated, you may have the chance to decide which director to go with. There has to be a chemistry, some mutual respect, some give and take between the two unless the author walks away and leaves it entirely to the director.
Both author and director understand story-telling but from different points of view. The author feels he understands the readers, what they want and expect. He has a clear view of his ‘integrity’ of things that must be included and not altered.
The director, on the other hand, knows that film is a visual medium and the story has to be told within 100 minutes. He knows that the audience will be a different one from the readership and include more young people. Young people go out to the cinema, old folk stay home and read.
Sebastian Faulks
Sebastian Faulks had the most liberal view. Let them get on with it, he did not mind that the ending of Charlotte Grey was different in the film. Perhaps he was too busy with his next book to be distracted by the film people.
He told us he thought that the film ’The English Patient’ was better than the book but a combination of Michael Ondaatje, author, and Anthony Minghella, director, was sure to be a success.
Faulks has written a James Bond novel for film. He described the tensions between the Fleming family, Ian Fleming wrote the original books, and the Broccoli family who make the films as like the Montagues and Capulets. He laughed and said that the book which he wrote in six weeks, is unlikely to reach the printing press.
Alexander McCall Smith
Alexander McCall Smith, whose No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series has been translated into a TV series, likes to keep an eye on things. The books are not just set in Botswana, they are Botswanan, they follow the culture and mores of the country. Smith has lived there for many years and knows.
If left, the screenplay will become an English detective story set in Africa. Smith insists that his heroine, Precious Ramotswe, be of ample Botswanan proportions. Botswana figures of speech and cadence must be preserved as well as their way of doing things.
Maylis de Kerangal
Siren-Com
In her book ‘Mend the Living’ Maylis de Kerangal, a French author, explored the donor of a heart for transplant and the feeling of his family. ‘Take the heart but please not the eyes.’ They asked. In the film the director emphasised more the reaction and feelings of the recipient to her new lease of life than to the donor and his family.
Shrahani Basu
Researching Victoria and Abdul was a long and thorough process. The book, by Shrabani Basu, is a piece of untold history which the author wished to be recorded accurately on film. There was some discussion about whether Abdul had a beard or not. He had a beard in real life, so he must have one in the film insisted the author.
Lord Puttnam
DavidPuttnamBAFTA07.jpg: Caroline Bonarde Ucci at https://www.flickr.com/photos/caroline_bonarde/ derivative work: Crashandspin
Lord Putnam, David Puttnam, the non-author in the panel has many successful films to his credit, ‘Chariots of Fire’ is well known. He said he did not mind authors contributing to the screenplay but he did not want them on the set. One man, the director must have control of the set and, if there are two or more, interference slows down the filming and flattens the performance of the actors.
In Puttnam’s opinion, the best films develop from ideas translated straight to screenplay without being filtered through a book.
All agreed that the author should write the book they want to write without thinking about possible film rights. Books with bits added, subtracted or modified in order to attract a film director will fail.
The Audience
The audience had a lively interaction with the discussants and were agreed that the golden thread between author and reader weaves a slightly different pattern in all our imaginations. In film the pattern weaver is the director, and his pattern will not be the same as yours. Sit back and enjoy the difference.
Does the appearance of the film enhance book sales? Yes, all were agreed.
With that, we all shuffled out of the air-conditioned Hall de Galle into the hot, humid, dusty Galle Fort and some of us strolled along the ramparts beside the sparkling ocean to the shade of the Dutch Hospital where ice cool Lion lager is dispensed for a modest fee.
Great post. Sometimes films can encourage reading, Mike. I speak from direct experience. I was engrossed by Alec Guinness’s performance as Fagin in Oliver Twist (Oliver Reed was Bill Sykes – brilliant casting for both) and read the book directly afterwards. Have loved Dickens ever since. Conversely, I knew my better half would never sit and read The Lord of the Rings. Drop the paperback trilogy on your foot and you’ll regret it, do it with the hardback and you’ll probably break a toe! I love the book, read it cover to cover but I persuaded him to see the films. He loved them. I see a good film as another way of getting a story to people. Won’t/can’t replace books in my view but useful all the same.
Wow, excellent piece has me thinking. Which is best? Hard to compare, because a comparison only works if the two are heading in the same direction with the same objectives. You may choose which you like or prefer, but that is not the same as saying which is best. It is rather like comparing soccer and cricket, both are played by teams, with a ball on a pitch, but whilst you may prefer one over the other there is no common standard to judge which is best. Some films depart almost completely from the book as with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which is hardly represented in the film with Boris Karloff as the monster, although it achieved the objective of scaring and entertaining. In some cases the film does try to follow the novel, as with Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, played in the films respectively by Alan Ladd and Robert Redford. Here the depiction of immorality of the rich, with an insight into the lives of the poor, in both novel and film head in the same direction. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, however, was based on the character Trimalchio in Petronius’s Satyricon which itself was made into a film by Frederico Fellini who radically departed from the original, adding characters in a surreal depiction of ancient Rome. Hard to compare is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, (ranked as the 14th best film ever) where both depict corruption of the soul. Despite many deviations from Conrad’s story Coppola said his film respects the spirit of the novella in particular ‘its critique of the concepts of civilization and progress’. Whereas the novella exhibits significant literary skills the film, presented in a different context, has been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.
The discussion did not explore the wonderful things that cinema can achieve and literature cannot. ‘Death in Venice’ has some amazing shots combined with Mahler’s music give something that cannot be achieved by literature.
On the other hand, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in the closing scenes of the film The Great Gatsby was just that, a green light, instead of a metaphor for the past and future in the book.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – You can’t put that on film.