The Confabulators go to the movies the same as the rest of you. We read a book, envision characters and places and hear the characters’ voices in our heads. You might think this makes us a harder audience to please than normal, but that’s not necessarily true. We can set our ideas aside and sit in the darkened theater alongside everyone else who’s read a book and appreciate it for what it is: a film. This week we challenged the Confabulators to tell us about their favorite adaptations.
Disney’s version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I waited my whole life to see that done right on the big screen. I read the book a million times. I had a map of Narnia on my wall next to my bed. I was the White Witch in a fourth-grade musical production we wrote ourselves. When the opening credits started to roll on the film, I was already crying. It was done so well, even down to keeping some of the dialogue from the book. Cried like a baby all through it.
When adapting a book to film which is more important, a faithful adaptation or making something even greater than the original text? Take, for example, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This visually stunning movie is more than an adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Between the great performances, special effects, and the soundtrack by Vangelis, the film transcends the novel on which it is loosely based. After seeing the film, I read the book. And while the book is strong in its own right, I feel the film is even better.
My favorite book to film adaptation is undoubtably Fight Club. IMHO, the book had a lot of unrealized potential that the movie tapped into, and turned a sketch into a fully realized world. The movie did what film can do best, creating indelible images and dramatizing big action, without undermining the integrity of the book’s ideology.
Eat, Pray, Love because the things that were changed made sense cinematically and yet stayed true to the spirit of the book.
Adapting books into film is very, very tricky and often if something’s not right it’s because the fans were too invested in the book to see the film as being it’s own thing, separate from the book. I really like The Silence of the Lambs as an adaptation even though it’s slightly different from the novel. The film is so good one can’t really complain. The other adaptation that is something you maybe haven’t seen or read and that’s Firebreather. It was a comic book then adapted as a Cartoon Network animated feature. Both are very good for different reasons and aimed at very different audiences.
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