Films adaptations of novels are a tried and true method of keeping the Hollywood machine churning. There is no shortage of original ideas, but there’s also no shortage of novels that would make fantastic cinema. By now, adaptation is its own art form. If you want to make a quality adaptation, these are the three rules you need to follow.
Rule 1: Use the Strengths of the New Medium
If you’re going to adapt a novel to a movie, you have to really lean into the fact that you are making a movie. That means that you have to consider the visual element that comes across in cinematography, mise-en-scene, and editing. Not to mention art direction and costuming and special effects and stunts. You have to consider sound, which includes dialogue, Foley work, the score, and other musical choices. Contemporary entertainment is so ingrained with the 4- or 5-act plot arc that you don’t even notice it. The question at the heart of your adaptation should ultimate be, how does this story fit into a movie?
Let’s look at Project Hail Mary. As a novel, Project Hail Mary (written by Andy Weir) mixes space adventure with science and humor to tell the story of Ryland Grace and his planet-saving mission to another star system. I personally find the prose lackluster and emotionally disconnected, so I was thrilled when the movie (directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller) languished in its medium. There are gorgeous shots of the space ship flying through space. The sound design gets me every time, particularly its use of silence. I could go on but I won’t bore you with my wonder.
As an adaptation, Project Hail Mary does exactly what an adaptation should do by keeping true to the spirit of the source material while showing off the strengths of its medium.
Rule 2: Write for a New Audience
A prevalent strategy that I’ve noticed in a lot of disappointing adaptations is a lack of care for the story itself. A story should be self-contained. You shouldn’t need to know or even be aware of the original source material. That’s just good storytelling. A lot of book-to-movie adaptations are written with the book fans in mind. I’m thinking of the YA novel movies like The Giver and The Divergent series, which had this air of attempting to capitalize on an already existing fanbase.
Getting that fanbase behind your adaptation is a boon, definitely, but your efforts should be in attempting to sway the people who haven’t read the novel or played the video game or collected the comic book issues. Any old schmuck should be able to watch your movie and understand everything without needing to do extra homework. The early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe attempted to do this but has since grown into the problem it sought to solve. So the example I bring you is Denis Villeneuve’s Dune series.
(For the sake of brevity, we’ll overlook the fact that Hollywood takes adult novels more seriously than YA ones.)
Dune parts 1 and 2 recreate the novel Dune by Frank Herbert, with Dune part 3 adapting Dune Messiah by the same. This is hardly the first Dune adaptation out there—there’s the infamous David Lynch film of the 1980s, there’s the SyFy mini series of the 2000s, and plenty more. What I like about the Villeneuve films is that they’re accessible. You can start Dune part 1 knowing absolutely nothing about the book or the series as a whole. Your biggest takeaway should be “That’s where the litany of fear comes from?”
A lot of modern day tropes and expectations were spearheaded by the novel, so if the movies feel familiar and trite, that’s intentional. These are honest adaptations. If I’m being honest, and I will be with you, my biggest impression when I finished the novel was “Here is the chosen one to end all chosen ones and his name is . . . Paul.”
Rule 3: Give the Fans a Reason to Watch Your Movie
Which is to say, if your adaptation is a one-to-one recreation of the original source material, you’re doing it wrong.
Look, this story is going from one medium to another. Of course there’s going to be changes, and it goes beyond cutting things for time. You have to think about how a movie sets up a twist, and whether your audience would be able to make the connection alongside your character. How is your adaptation handling metaphor, or throughlines that don’t otherwise translate off the page? You have to think about the skills of the people who also have a hand in making this film, because your art director and score composer and cinematographer and sound editor will all have their own opinions and creative contributions.
I frequently think of The Hunger Games novels, and how the film adaptation recreated the first-person, present tense narration by having tight close up shots on Jennifer Lawrence’s face. We didn’t just focus on Katniss the entire time either. My favorite thing about those movies is how we were allowed to pull away from the action in the arena. We see the uprising in District 8. We see President Snow’s gift to the gamemaster. Mostly, I think about how Suzanne Collins wrote the screenplay for her own book’s Hollywood adaptation and that contributed to its success. (I can digress into how The Hunger Games is frequently thought to be the same trite dystopian literature as its descendants, but that’s an essay for another time.)
Mostly, I think about how if you’re setting out to adapt an existing story, the biggest question you need to answer is why you’re adapting it in the first place. After all, if you’re making a one-to-one adaptation, why should people flock to your adaptation when the original exists?
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