Books adapted into films: the crossing, defined
A book-to-film adaptation is a film built from an existing written work: it takes the story, the people and the world of a novel, a novella, a memoir or a short story and rebuilds them in a medium that has no interior voice, no reader-controlled pace and, in most cases, between 90 and 150 minutes to work in. The written work does not survive the crossing whole. Part of it transfers intact, part transfers transformed, and part cannot make the trip at all. Everything interesting about adaptation happens in that third category, and every argument about whether a film is "like the book" is really an argument about which losses the reader was willing to accept.
This reference judges each crossing on 4 points, kept separate because films travel different distances on each one: plot, character, voice and theme. A film can hold the plot almost exactly and abandon the voice completely. Another can throw away nearly every event and keep the theme so precisely that readers recognise it at once.
What transfers intact, and what has to be rebuilt
What transfers intact is everything a novel already holds in a visible or audible form: events, names, places, objects and dialogue. John Huston's The Maltese Falcon of 1941 carries so much of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel across that the film can be read as the book with the description removed. What has to be rebuilt is everything a novel holds in language alone: what a person is thinking, how long a moment lasts, who is telling the story and whether they can be trusted. None of that has a camera equivalent. It has to be reinvented as behaviour, as editing, as performance, or it disappears.
The rebuild is not automatically a loss. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner of 1982 discards most of the plot of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from 1968, along with its religion and its electric animals, and keeps one thing: the question of how you would know whether the person in front of you is a person. Readers who came for that question accept the film. Readers who came for the animals do not.
The 4 kinds of change every adaptation makes
The 4 kinds of change are compression, externalisation, relocation and resolution, and no adaptation avoids all 4.
- Compression. Cut events, characters and time until the story fits a running time. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring of 2001 removes the 17 years that pass in the novel between Bilbo's party and Frodo's departure, because a film cannot let its hero sit still that long.
- Externalisation. Turn thought into something a camera can record. Henry Selick's Coraline of 2009 invents a boy who does not exist in Neil Gaiman's 2002 novella, so that a girl who spends the book alone with her own mind has somebody to say things to.
- Relocation. Move the story in place, period or language. The 9th Life of Louis Drax, directed by Alexandre Aja in 2016 from Liz Jensen's 2004 novel, moves the case out of France and into North America, which changes the institutions, the accents and the class signals of everyone in it.
- Resolution. Close what the book left open, or open what the book closed. Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park of 1993 lets John Hammond survive; Michael Crichton's 1990 novel does not, and the difference turns a cautionary fable into a rescue.
Jensen's novel keeps the reader inside a 9-year-old boy who is in a coma, alternating his first-person account with the doctor treating him. The boy's voice is the whole apparatus: the reader knows what the adults do not because the boy is talking.
Aja's film has to put that interior on a screen. It gives the boy a visible inner world and hands much of the enquiry to the doctor, so the audience watches an adult work out what a reader was simply told.
Why one novel produces two films that do not resemble each other
One novel produces unlike films because each adaptation selects a different layer of it and treats that layer as the book. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein of 1818 contains a nested set of narrators and a creature who is articulate, who reads and who argues his case. James Whale's 1931 film keeps the laboratory and the pursuit and makes the creature mute, which produces a monster movie. Kenneth Branagh's 1994 film restores the creature's speech and the Arctic frame, which produces a tragedy. Both are recognisably the same book. Neither is the other film.
The same fork runs through most repeatedly adapted novels. Readers then argue past each other, in reviews and in long Reddit threads, because they are not comparing the film to the book. They are comparing it to the layer of the book they happened to read for.
What "the best adaptation" means once you stop counting deviations
The best adaptations are not the ones that deviate least. They are the ones that identify what the book was actually doing and find a film mechanism that does the same job. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather of 1972 drops whole strands of Mario Puzo's 1969 novel and keeps the one that matters, the slow conversion of the youngest son. The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men of 2007 keeps Cormac McCarthy's refusal to stage the death the audience is waiting for, which is the single decision most adaptations would have reversed. James Ivory's The Remains of the Day of 1993 cannot use Kazuo Ishiguro's unreliable narrator, so it substitutes a face that will not say the thing.
| Work | Book | Film | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Maltese Falcon | 1930 | 1941 | |
| The Godfather | 1969 | 1972 | |
| Jurassic Park | 1990 | 1993 | |
| The 9th Life of Louis Drax | 2004 | 2016 | |
| Blade Runner | 1968 | 1982 |
Where the practice began, and what it has become
The practice began almost as soon as film could tell a story at all. Georges Méliès filmed Cendrillon in 1899 from Charles Perrault's fairy tale, and in 1902 built Le Voyage dans la Lune out of material from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Edwin S. Porter made Uncle Tom's Cabin for Edison in 1903 from Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel. The question of permission reached a court soon afterwards: F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu of 1922 was made from Bram Stoker's Dracula without rights, Stoker's widow Florence sued, and in 1925 a German court ordered the prints destroyed.
What has changed since is scale and commissioning. Novels are optioned before publication, streaming services including Netflix commission adaptations as a supply of finished stories, romance and young-adult titles reach the screen in 2 or 3 years rather than 20, and slates already carry adaptation dates out to 2027. The economics changed. The mechanism did not: a film still has to decide which layer of the book it is making, and then find pictures for the part that was only ever words.