Adaptation: Where is the line?
Posted: Feb 27, 2017 7:15 pm
In all my years anticipating Narnia films, I can't believe I didn't came across this quote until last week:
Unpacking that a bit... It makes perfect sense to make changes to adapt a book for the screen. Not everything that works well in a book will have the same effect in a movie. Moreover, telling a story in a visual medium gives you opportunities that books simply don't have. As a filmmaker, your first priority should be to make a great film.
... But there comes a point where, as filmmakers, they have to ask "What is the point in adapting this story if we have to change it so fundamentally?" At that point, change the character names and write an original screenplay.
Besides just being a mediocre-at-best movie, I think Dawn Treader crossed this line. It's fundamentally not the same story. The book was about the fear and awe of sailing into the unknown, the longing to reach something beyond the world, and the duty to find the seven lords that never returned. The movie is about trying to defeat a green smoke monster. They should have changed the character and location names, removed Lewis' name from the credits, and titled the movie "The Seven Swords."
So, to the Silver Chair filmmakers: Do what you have to do to make a great movie. But don't lose sight of what makes The Silver Chair a classic in the first place.
C.S. Lewis ("On Stories," 1947) wrote:I was once taken to a see a film version of King Solomon's Mines. Of its many sins--not the least the introduction of a totally irrelevant young woman in shorts who accompanied the three adventurers wherever they went--only one here concerns us. At the end of Haggard's book, as everyone remembers, the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land. The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the scene in the original was not 'cinematic' and the man was right, by the canons of his own art, in altering it. But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined. Ruined, at least, for me.
Unpacking that a bit... It makes perfect sense to make changes to adapt a book for the screen. Not everything that works well in a book will have the same effect in a movie. Moreover, telling a story in a visual medium gives you opportunities that books simply don't have. As a filmmaker, your first priority should be to make a great film.
... But there comes a point where, as filmmakers, they have to ask "What is the point in adapting this story if we have to change it so fundamentally?" At that point, change the character names and write an original screenplay.
Besides just being a mediocre-at-best movie, I think Dawn Treader crossed this line. It's fundamentally not the same story. The book was about the fear and awe of sailing into the unknown, the longing to reach something beyond the world, and the duty to find the seven lords that never returned. The movie is about trying to defeat a green smoke monster. They should have changed the character and location names, removed Lewis' name from the credits, and titled the movie "The Seven Swords."
So, to the Silver Chair filmmakers: Do what you have to do to make a great movie. But don't lose sight of what makes The Silver Chair a classic in the first place.