3 Great Movies Adapted From Books (Pt.2)

I'm thinking about making this into a series, but I want to see how people respond to it first. Many people have told me that 'this movie should not have been adapted into a movie' or 'they did not do this right in the film' and honestly, as someone who loves literature, I can agree to an extent. But, if I was going to just focus on how close the film is to the book and how honest to the source material it was, then I will end up never really understanding why the movie was made at all.

Since this is the second part in our series, you can view the first part by clicking here

When on my M.A for film and writing, I developed a way of looking at adaptations that made it possible to rate how effective the adaptation from the book was. Here are the three maxims if you will, that I developed:

• The same/similar atmosphere
• Speech reflecting the ideas and themes of the novel
• Characters which have similarities to the characters in the book

Through this, there is really no way that the director or screenwriter could change the basic premise of the source material to suit the movie. If you take the same atmosphere of the source material and have the speech of the characters reflecting the same themes of the book then you need to link it into a plot-line and the only way to do that effectively would be to use the storyline from the source material. When it comes to the characters, the adaptation needs to be aware that the book itself may be plot-driven and descriptive, the movie is going to be character-driven whether they like it or not. The characters are going to carry the story unless, like Quentin Tarantino, you can afford to push in a narrator and make it work. But be careful because it does not work all of the time.

Let's have a look at three great movies that were effective adaptations from books. Also, don't worry if you don't see your favourites. My email is in my bio so get in touch if you want to seriously see something soon, but I will do my best to include more different types of adaptations in further parts to this series.

They are in no particular order.

A Scanner Darkly

So, does "A Scanner Darkly" have the same or a similar atmosphere as the book does? Yes. The book is a graphic novel and the film is actually, and very cleverly, filmed in a graphic novel style. I personally thought this was a brilliant addition to show that it was adapted from a book. When it comes to how the book is actually character-driven through its absoluteness and concentration on speech, it makes it a whole lot easier to adapt it into a movie because a movie, obviously, cannot have somebody describing things like the author of a book does. When it comes to the characters, not only does it have to have a character-driven storyline, but it also contains characters which aline themselves very well with the half-comical traits of the ones in the book. Making this a very successful adaptation.

Schindler's List

One of the most moving films of all time was adapted from a book by Thomas Keneally called "Schindler's Ark" which, in fact, is based on a real event about a kind-hearted man who may have been a member of the Nazi Party, but was actually helping the Jewish Folk escape the death camps. The reason why it is so successful is because it matches up to the three maxims very well. The atmosphere of the book is very dramatic, very intense and very urgent - something that the film gives us by it's music, it's shots of the 'list' etc. The speech definitely reflects the speech in the book, because I'm not going to lie - if this film got Oskar Schindler wrong, there would have been a lot of people who would have been very upset. You know, the sons and daughters of the people that Oskar Schindler saved - I would imagine that they would be upset. But the real reason why Spielberg's film did so well is because it took this book about a character of history and made it into a dramatic, urgent and intense film revolving around his main action upon the world around him. Adding in that ending of people he saved visiting his grave was just the cream on top. I had never been so happy to see people alive.

Strangers on a Train

Possibly one of my favourite films of its era, "Strangers on a Train" is based on a noir book by the legendary creator of Mr. Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith. As a writer, Patricia Highsmith was a great creator of dark, criminal and psychological noir and depicting this on screen would have maybe been impossible without the input of Sir Alfred Hitchcock. In terms of reflecting the atmosphere, we have that incredible music in the background, we have that carousel scene and the tennis court scene. We have cuts that flash back and forth between different scenes and times. We have a massive sense of urgency. The speech reflecting the ideas of the book is seen because of the way the characters, who are very different, interact with each other and how they act upon the variables of the story - especially concerning the asphyxiation scene. Through this, we see that the character traits concerning how they are opposites that came from Patricia Highsmith's novel are put on to the screen and made alive by the action of one and the inaction of the other. A very successful movie adapted from a brilliant book.