Monday

[The final part of Alex's examination of film adaptations.]

So if you're still reading four days in you'll know that we are in a situation where we as writers know that the medium is inexorably linked to the story and so we shouldn't adapt the work, but on the other hand we know that it's commercially lucrative to do so. How do we reconcile the two?

Well I'll tell you how most people do it, they fudge it. Most adaptations simply go through the book looking for bits where they talk about where people are and put that in square brackets. And then look for the bits where people are speaking and turn that into dialogue. Everything else gets thrown away and that’s how you get your movie running time. These are generally the worst kind of movies that there are. This, for example, is exactly what they did with the The Da Vinci Code.

The best method seems to be to throw away the actual words and just listen to the story. We've recently learned that this is exactly what happened in the first Bourne film. The director wrote a 25 page short story treatment of the book and demanded that the author not look at the whole book, he had to work simply from those pages. It worked very well and it's difficult to imagine Bourne as a novel while you're watching the film - surely the best compliment we can give.

Finally this is the crux of excellent adaptation, there must be a "re-imagining" of the original. It's difficult because fans of the original, the very fans who are pre-sold on this franchise don't like it when you change their source material. This was a key problem for The Lord of the Rings. In the end I felt they were too respectful of the original, but the fans were widespread and militant so they certainly made the correct commercial decision. Usually it's the other way around. It's always safer to abuse the fans, they'll turn up anyway. On the other hand, if you forget to write a good film everyone else will stay away.