OnWriting Online: Reflections on Adaptation

“Motion pictures are different than the published word. The form is different. The mechanism of storytelling – of course it’s different. But I think as long as you’re trying to hold fast to the spirit of the story itself… as long as you have a clear understanding of the intent of the storytellers responsible for this motion picture… and you can reconcile those, you’re fine. But what you don’t want to do is to take on an assignment and then deliberately go out… and just totally trash the source material.”

“My agent called me and said ‘I think you’d be really great for this project (Sunshine). It’s an Istvan Szabo film’… I said ‘Yeah… I think it would be a great honor.’ What came to me was about an eight hundred page miniseries that he had written for television that was too expensive. Didn’t get made… All eight hundred pages had enormous meaning to Istvan Szabo… And the film company wanted to do a feature film based on it. The agent had said to me ‘This will take six months.’ It took three years!”

In Part 2, the screenwriters address the issue of responsibility – not only to the original writer, but to an audience who may come to a film with their own expectations. They reflect on navigating the fine line between remaining “true to the spirit of the story” and what some may view as a “betrayal” of the original material.

In this first of two webisodes, the writers explore the rewards and the pitfalls of adapting someone else’s original concept for the screen. They share some of their most effective breakthroughs, as well as a few of the red flags they’ve discovered along the way.

“I wrote the novel (The Householder) in 1960. In 1962 two very young men showed up, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. And they said they wanted to make a film and they wanted me to write a screenplay of ‘The Householder’. And I said, ‘I’ve never written a film’. They said, ‘That’s OK, we’ve never made one.’ That’s how we started.”