Putting Picture into Words

by Emily Roberts on October 27, 2012

Surely, you have had that friend who says, “It’s no good compared to the book,” every time you watch a film which was based on a novel. For some reason, filmmakers are finding it rather challenging to feed the expectations and satisfy audiences with movie adaptations of books, especially the popular ones.

We’ve all heard it before – the Harry Potter seven-part series creating a degree of discontent on the part of the dedicated bookworms, who seem to be checking on every last detail which was missed – or tweaked – in the movie versions. The Lord of the Rings movie franchise also based its success on the novels by J.R.R. Tolkien, and soon enough, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books faced the same fate. We could go on and on with the number of books turned into movies – The Hunger Games, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and so on. There seems to be a common trend: those who have read the books before watching the movie always feel that the books are way better. Those who have only seen the film version, though, either loved the movie or didn’t “get it.”

This can be trivial to understand for those among us who focus on the literary aspect of the story. In a book, words are very important. Because there aren’t any images and sound to accompany the text, it is all up to the readers’ imagination and interpretation of the story to put a face to the characters, a scenery to the setting, and so on. This could be one common cause of conflict, when what they have perceived goes off in comparison to what they see on the big screen.

If this is not the case, it may be that the audience finds it difficult, if not impossible, to accept that film adaptations are what they are: film adaptations. The filmmakers cannot afford to include every inch of detail as the book has led them to imagine, otherwise the movies would take forever to screen, let alone make. This is a hard thing to accept for fans, but films are based on scriptwriting which was based on the book – there has to be something changed, added, taken out, or modified somewhere along the way. I guess the best way to see it is to have another band cover one of the classic songs originally sung by another artist. The cover band wouldn’t do it in exactly the same way as it was done originally, otherwise there would be no much point.

In the present, many international filmmakers are facing these challenges – to keep the films as loyal to the books as possible, without compromising the movie’s “movie” quality. As they say, you can’t please everyone, but rest assured that the people behind the camera are doing the best that they can to please as many people as possible. In this interview, some of the most acclaimed filmmakers of today explain these challenges that they go through.

Previous post:

Next post: