Converting a novel to a film script
ByScripts are generated at a lightning speed in the film industry. There is no dearth of scriptwriters who provide the industry with their creation, which can be original, inspired or adapted from a novel. Scripts that are adapted from a novel are quite challenging as viewers already have a high expectation set with regard to the novel, and expect the film to be as good as the book, if not better. Hence it is the responsibility of the script to be compact, and yet not cut out important part from the original text. The report points out a few ways to create a script out of a novel.
1.It has to be determined whether the novel has the merit to be transformed into a film. A film needs to be full of actions and movements, and hence the book needs to provide such content in abundance.
2.The type of the book has to be identified. Some books are driven by the characters while some are plot-oriented. The script must be prepared according to the theme of the book. Most often, the readers of the novel turn out to be the audience of the film; hence they must get a feel of the book in the film.
3.There will be some viewers who havenít read the book. A blatant copy of the book might seem uninspiring for them. Hence equilibrium must be maintained. While the script can take cinematic liberties, it should adhere to the main plot of the story.
4.The characters must be recognized properly in the script, especially the protagonist. In a character driven storyline, it is very important that the character is exactly represented as in the novel, as the character is the main straw of the whole project.
5.The novel must be broken into acts. There should be ideally three acts, where the first act generally introduces the characters, especially the central one, and the general feel of the film. The second act brings in the main plot – the conflict that concerns the main character, while the final act brings a conclusion to the conflict, which could be either positive or negative, depending on the story.
6.Generally, a novel is cut short to one third its original length. This is acceptable only when the script does not miss out on arts of the novel, which the viewers were particularly interested in seeing. Especially while coming to the climax, the scenes that bring the story to it must also be included in the script, otherwise viewers might find it confusing.
How will you use this information to the fullest?
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I have never liked the idea of converting a novel to a script for one film, or even a trilogy of films. In my opinion, there is so much information in a novel, that, to convert it properly would require a television-series or a television-mini-series, or an equivalent number of cinematic productions.
For instance: The Count Of Monte Cristo (1844), one of the greatest stories of all time, is a novel that utilizes approximately one thousand pages. Alexandre Dumas designed a story that contained characters who had such intricate lives and relationships, that separate novels could have been written about any of them alone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_count_of_monte_cristo). Yet, the two most well-known cinematic versions of the story are on screen for only 103 minutes (1973) and 131 minutes (2002)! I admit that I enjoyed the 1973 film which starred Richard Chamberlain and Louis Jourdan, but when I discovered how much of the story had been forsaken for book-to-movie protocols, I felt that I had been cheated, and an enormous artistic crime had been committed.
Unfortunately, the novel-to-film genre suffers from the same problem that plagues all of filmdom: the bout between art and business. In one corner, there is the filmmaker, who wants to transform a literary-masterpiece into a cinematic-masterpiece. On the other hand, there is the financier, who wants only to take a proven financially-successful story, and with as little money as possible, produce a film that generates as much financial success as possible.
This vexes me because I am an artist, and I am quite familiar with the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual effort that must be expended in order to produce art. Great novels are written by people who have vested enormous amounts of time, thought, and emotion in their stories; writing, re-writing, and often battling “writer’s block.” They infuse their stories with excerpts of anguish and joy from their own lives. They conceive, scrutinize, design, and analyze every detail of character, locale, and plot, in order to vividly describe a world, and the events that occur in that world, so that the reader can easily and clearly visualize the story. When an author has completed his/her novel, a chunk of his/her very being is on those pages, along with the fiction that was weaved.
And then someone who had absolutely nothing to do with the conception, nurturing, crafting, and completion of the novel decides what should be changed and what should be excised in order to reduce the production’s budget and to compress the story into feature-length duration. This is deplorable, if only from the creative/entertainment standpoint of: which version of the story do I believe; the novel, or the film? Which work is canon; the author’s, or the movie-studio’s?
I believe in having respect for the artist by remaining true to the artist’s art.
Here is my question: if a novel is successful, then would not a faithful translation of the story to cinematic-form be just as successful, and possibly even more so? As someone said long ago, “If it is not broken, then do not ‘fix’ it.”
I am sorry; I made a typographic error. The correct link for The Count Of Monte Cristo page is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_count_of_monte_cristo