Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin premiered to critical acclaim this week at Cannes. Yet for all the accolades which will surely come Ramsay’s way, she cannot claim to have conceived the film’s dark premise. That honour falls upon Lionel Shriver, from whose 2003 novel the screenplay was adapted. This is nothing new of course, Mario Puzo’s name is synonymous not with his unremarkable pulp writing but rather his 1972 best adapted screenplay Oscar for The Godfather; Kubrick rarely shied from an adaptation; Hitchcock, Scorsese, virtually every great director has, at some point, translated from page to screen. But the question remains, what are the secrets behind turning a book into a great film?
The quality of the original is patently not one. The correlation between great books and great films is extraordinarily weak. While Rebecca and The Leopard can reasonably claim to have crossed the mediums intact, one would be hard pressed to find another faithful adaptation of a definitively great novel. The Kite Runner demonstrates some of the problems; what passes in the novel as elegant prose becomes a tepid story, devoid of tension and monotonously paced.
Hitchcock, interviewed by Truffaut, claimed, “to convey [a great novel] in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six to 10-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.” Indeed Truffaut could himself have taken benefited from some of this advice given the disparity in quality between Fahrenheit 451 and Vertigo. Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that some of the best adaptations of recent years have been loose, to say the least. Brokeback Mountain expanded Annie Proulx’s short story to a sweeping epic, The Social Network’s frenetically brilliant dialogue stems not from its source material but the pen of Aaron Sorkin and 127 Hours strips out almost all biography to create a film of almost unpleasant intensity.
Herein lies the crucial point when adapting source material; whilst a book may provide the basis for the film, the creative vision must be original. Hitchcock claimed that he never read Psycho, the idea was enough to make the film. Whilst this may be a little extreme, the point remains; Conrad may not have even recognised Heart of Darkness in Apocalypse Now, and we have Coppola to thank for that. Rather than seeking to methodically recreate a great novel on screen, the best adaptations draw from their source for ideas yet respect the differences between a verbal and a fundamentally visual medium.
