
By the book?
For the writers behind 2005's most Oscar-worthy adapted screenplays, capturing the essence of some stellar source material proved a real challenge.
By Todd Longwell
As author of the novella "Shopgirl," Steve Martin knew its story and its characters inside and out. But when it came time to translate those pages to the big screen for Buena Vista's adaptation, he was faced with the same conundrums that have daunted adapters throughout film history, chiefly the fact that books can go wherever the writer wants, inside the minds of every character and across a multitude of geographic locations, without concern for budget or structural and time constraints. Movies, as a rule, cannot.
"I knew that my biggest challenge was that in the book, there's very little dialogue, and the narrator is constantly inside the characters' heads," Martin says. "That was the thing that actually kept me from it for a while, until I figured out it could be done."
Martin was fortunate in the fact that, if he botched the job, he wouldn't have to deal with the wrath of a wordsmith wronged -- only self-loathing, professional embarrassment and, most significantly, the eternal ire of the book's devoted fans. Other novelists have to place their faith in screenwriters they typically have never even met, hoping that the men and women who set about adapting their prized work for the big screen will do so with grace and conviction.
While each project has its own challenges, writers can sometimes feel overwhelmed when struggling to adapt a piece of great literature that is beloved by a wide audience. In the case of Sony's "Memoirs of a Geisha," even scripter Robin Swicord counted herself among the legions of ardent fans of Arthur Golden's novel about a young country girl who becomes the most-celebrated geisha in 1930s Japan. But that didn't stop her from making some significant changes in service of the cinematic story.
"I feel like we got the important stuff out of the novel, and certainly discerning readers can disagree, but we weren't trying to make the novel," says Swicord, who previously adapted Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" (1994) and Roald Dahl's "Matilda" (1996), the latter with husband Nicholas Kazan. "We were trying to make a film that was adapted from a novel."
Screenwriters Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus (along with Ann Peacock and Andrew Adamson) had to tackle one of the most-lauded fantasy tales of all time when they set about penning the script for Buena Vista's adaptation of C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe," and, like Swicord, they knew they would need to make alterations to the narrative to make it work onscreen. Specifically, McFeely and Markus say they found the voices of the four Pevensie children to be distressingly similar in Lewis' original tome.
"You could pick out a lot of lines of dialogue from the book, and it would be hard to know who said them if I didn't tell you," McFeely says. "So, we wanted that to be less the case in the movie and have something only Susan (Anna Popplewell) could (say) and something only the wide-eyed Lucy (Georgie Henley) could say."
The writers also opted to play up the rivalry between the heroic Peter (William Moseley) and his younger brother Edmund (Skandar Keynes), who betrays his brother and sisters to the evil White Witch (Tilda Swinton) for treats in the form of Turkish Delight. "Four siblings do not get along," Markus says. "I don't care if they're the greatest siblings in the world, they're not going to lock arms and skip through Narnia."
Deborah Moggach, too, felt compelled to make a few changes when she set about penning the screenplay for "Pride & Prejudice," Focus Features' adaptation of Jane Austen's comedy of manners -- namely, fine-tuning the language. Moggach says she was eager to make sure the novel's early 19th century dialogue sounded good to contemporary ears.
"I had an old battered copy of the book, and I stood in front of the mirror and read out passages of dialogue to myself; a lot of them read incredibly well," Moggach recalls. "People who have read the book will recognize a lot of it in the dialogue, but it's sometimes been simplified and changed. I've sort of pulled a comb through the tangles."
"When you are adapting a much-loved classic, you are obviously treading on far more egg shells than when you are adapting a book that has been out of fashion for a long time," offers writer-director Julian Fellowes, who admits that he had a relatively easy go of it with Fox Searchlight's "Separate Lies," which is based on Nigel Balchin's 1951 novel "A Way Through the Wood." Not only had Balchin been dead since 1970, his popularity had fallen off precipitously since his professional peak in the 1940s and '50s, meaning that Fellowes didn't have to face up to the expectations of die-hard fans.
Similarly, novelist-screenwriter Larry McMurtry (1971's "The Last Picture Show," television's "Lonesome Dove") believes Annie Proulx's 1997 short story "Brokeback Mountain" is a masterpiece, "but it's so new that people don't have to be inhibited by its masterpieceness as you might if you were doing a (Anton) Chekov story or something."
As good as it was, Proulx's tale of Wyoming ranch hands (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall) who fall in love only had enough material to make a half-hour film, so McMurty and co-writer Diana Ossana amplified and expanded elements of the story that were touched up, but not fully developed, such as the domestic lives of the two protagonists.
"Larry and I have adapted a lot of novels, his as well as other people's, and it's always a challenge," Ossana says. "This is the first short story that we've adapted. We found that we could just sort of give our imaginations free reign -- along certain guidelines, of course."
Sometimes, films that qualify as adaptations by the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are only tangentially related to their credited source material. For example, Fox's "Walk the Line" is based on two Johnny Cash autobiographies, 1975's "The Man in Black" and 1998's "Cash." But the script is really more the product of a series of interviews with the country music legend and his wife, June Carter, that were conducted over a period of 71⁄2 years, from 1996 until 21⁄2 weeks prior to Cash's death in September 2003 -- and candid conversations with important figures in his life, such as first-wife Vivian Liberto and longtime drummer W.S. "Fluke" Holland.
"The autobiographies were something we got the rights to, and we certainly used material from them," says James Mangold, who directed "Walk" as well as co-wrote the script with Gill Dennis. "But we used them as a framework for things that were kind of left out or things we still had questions about in terms of the period we were dramatizing. I was startled when I read 'Cash' because there were these very powerful sections that John had removed, I think because he did not want to hurt others. John told me, 'If anyone's going to look bad, let it be me.'"
In the end, almost every screenwriter says it is their job to translate the heart and soul of the source material to the screen. If that means altering the narrative itself, giving characters a new or expanded back story or just rewriting bits of language, so be it, as long as the end result satisfies audiences -- both those acquainted with the book and newcomers, too.
"I always promise authors I may change every line of dialogue in it, there will be scenes you don't recognize, but what I will do is keep the spirit of the book," offers Jeffrey Caine, who scripted Focus Features' big-screen version of John le Carre's "The Constant Gardener." "I will tell the story you told, and it will have the meaning that you wanted the book to have. I think it's the best promise you can make an author."
For the writers behind 2005's most Oscar-worthy adapted screenplays, capturing the essence of some stellar source material proved a real challenge.
By Todd Longwell
As author of the novella "Shopgirl," Steve Martin knew its story and its characters inside and out. But when it came time to translate those pages to the big screen for Buena Vista's adaptation, he was faced with the same conundrums that have daunted adapters throughout film history, chiefly the fact that books can go wherever the writer wants, inside the minds of every character and across a multitude of geographic locations, without concern for budget or structural and time constraints. Movies, as a rule, cannot.
"I knew that my biggest challenge was that in the book, there's very little dialogue, and the narrator is constantly inside the characters' heads," Martin says. "That was the thing that actually kept me from it for a while, until I figured out it could be done."
Martin was fortunate in the fact that, if he botched the job, he wouldn't have to deal with the wrath of a wordsmith wronged -- only self-loathing, professional embarrassment and, most significantly, the eternal ire of the book's devoted fans. Other novelists have to place their faith in screenwriters they typically have never even met, hoping that the men and women who set about adapting their prized work for the big screen will do so with grace and conviction.
While each project has its own challenges, writers can sometimes feel overwhelmed when struggling to adapt a piece of great literature that is beloved by a wide audience. In the case of Sony's "Memoirs of a Geisha," even scripter Robin Swicord counted herself among the legions of ardent fans of Arthur Golden's novel about a young country girl who becomes the most-celebrated geisha in 1930s Japan. But that didn't stop her from making some significant changes in service of the cinematic story.
"I feel like we got the important stuff out of the novel, and certainly discerning readers can disagree, but we weren't trying to make the novel," says Swicord, who previously adapted Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" (1994) and Roald Dahl's "Matilda" (1996), the latter with husband Nicholas Kazan. "We were trying to make a film that was adapted from a novel."
Screenwriters Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus (along with Ann Peacock and Andrew Adamson) had to tackle one of the most-lauded fantasy tales of all time when they set about penning the script for Buena Vista's adaptation of C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe," and, like Swicord, they knew they would need to make alterations to the narrative to make it work onscreen. Specifically, McFeely and Markus say they found the voices of the four Pevensie children to be distressingly similar in Lewis' original tome.
"You could pick out a lot of lines of dialogue from the book, and it would be hard to know who said them if I didn't tell you," McFeely says. "So, we wanted that to be less the case in the movie and have something only Susan (Anna Popplewell) could (say) and something only the wide-eyed Lucy (Georgie Henley) could say."
The writers also opted to play up the rivalry between the heroic Peter (William Moseley) and his younger brother Edmund (Skandar Keynes), who betrays his brother and sisters to the evil White Witch (Tilda Swinton) for treats in the form of Turkish Delight. "Four siblings do not get along," Markus says. "I don't care if they're the greatest siblings in the world, they're not going to lock arms and skip through Narnia."
Deborah Moggach, too, felt compelled to make a few changes when she set about penning the screenplay for "Pride & Prejudice," Focus Features' adaptation of Jane Austen's comedy of manners -- namely, fine-tuning the language. Moggach says she was eager to make sure the novel's early 19th century dialogue sounded good to contemporary ears.
"I had an old battered copy of the book, and I stood in front of the mirror and read out passages of dialogue to myself; a lot of them read incredibly well," Moggach recalls. "People who have read the book will recognize a lot of it in the dialogue, but it's sometimes been simplified and changed. I've sort of pulled a comb through the tangles."
"When you are adapting a much-loved classic, you are obviously treading on far more egg shells than when you are adapting a book that has been out of fashion for a long time," offers writer-director Julian Fellowes, who admits that he had a relatively easy go of it with Fox Searchlight's "Separate Lies," which is based on Nigel Balchin's 1951 novel "A Way Through the Wood." Not only had Balchin been dead since 1970, his popularity had fallen off precipitously since his professional peak in the 1940s and '50s, meaning that Fellowes didn't have to face up to the expectations of die-hard fans.
Similarly, novelist-screenwriter Larry McMurtry (1971's "The Last Picture Show," television's "Lonesome Dove") believes Annie Proulx's 1997 short story "Brokeback Mountain" is a masterpiece, "but it's so new that people don't have to be inhibited by its masterpieceness as you might if you were doing a (Anton) Chekov story or something."
As good as it was, Proulx's tale of Wyoming ranch hands (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall) who fall in love only had enough material to make a half-hour film, so McMurty and co-writer Diana Ossana amplified and expanded elements of the story that were touched up, but not fully developed, such as the domestic lives of the two protagonists.
"Larry and I have adapted a lot of novels, his as well as other people's, and it's always a challenge," Ossana says. "This is the first short story that we've adapted. We found that we could just sort of give our imaginations free reign -- along certain guidelines, of course."
Sometimes, films that qualify as adaptations by the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are only tangentially related to their credited source material. For example, Fox's "Walk the Line" is based on two Johnny Cash autobiographies, 1975's "The Man in Black" and 1998's "Cash." But the script is really more the product of a series of interviews with the country music legend and his wife, June Carter, that were conducted over a period of 71⁄2 years, from 1996 until 21⁄2 weeks prior to Cash's death in September 2003 -- and candid conversations with important figures in his life, such as first-wife Vivian Liberto and longtime drummer W.S. "Fluke" Holland.
"The autobiographies were something we got the rights to, and we certainly used material from them," says James Mangold, who directed "Walk" as well as co-wrote the script with Gill Dennis. "But we used them as a framework for things that were kind of left out or things we still had questions about in terms of the period we were dramatizing. I was startled when I read 'Cash' because there were these very powerful sections that John had removed, I think because he did not want to hurt others. John told me, 'If anyone's going to look bad, let it be me.'"
In the end, almost every screenwriter says it is their job to translate the heart and soul of the source material to the screen. If that means altering the narrative itself, giving characters a new or expanded back story or just rewriting bits of language, so be it, as long as the end result satisfies audiences -- both those acquainted with the book and newcomers, too.
"I always promise authors I may change every line of dialogue in it, there will be scenes you don't recognize, but what I will do is keep the spirit of the book," offers Jeffrey Caine, who scripted Focus Features' big-screen version of John le Carre's "The Constant Gardener." "I will tell the story you told, and it will have the meaning that you wanted the book to have. I think it's the best promise you can make an author."